The Kitware Blog

SPIE Medical Imaging Conference: Live demonstrations workshop

Stephen Aylward — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 11:38:57 -0500

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
SPIE Medical Imaging 2012: Live Demonstrations Workshop

Kitware is proud to continue its support of the SPIE Medical Imaging Live Demonstrations Workshop for 2012. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for systems and algorithms developers to show off their creations. The intent is for the audience to be inspired to conduct derivative research, for the demonstrators to receive feedback and find new collaborators, and for all to learn about the rapidly evolving field of medical imaging. Last year's workshop attracted well over 100 attendees and hosted multitude of demonstrations and discussions.

The 2012 Live Demonstration Workshop will be held as part of the 2012 SPIE Medical Imaging Conference (February 4 - 9, San Diego, California, USA). The workshop is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, 7 February 2012, 5:00 – 7:00 pm.

This year, the Live Demonstration Workshop has been expanded to encourage participation from all of the conferences that comprise the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference. Previously the workshop featured CAD demonstrations. This year we are encouraging the PACS, Perception, Physics, Visualization, and all other conferences to participate.

This workshop will feature interactive demonstrations that are complementary to the oral and poster presentations of SPIE Medical Imaging. During this event, authors of SPIE MI papers will be hosting samples, systems, and software demonstrations that depict the implementation, operation, and utility of their research.

The workshop will start with a short overview of the participating teams and systems. Next, the audience can interact with the teams during live demonstrations of the systems.

Submitting a demonstration

Those interested in giving a demonstration are invited to send an e-mail to Stephen R. Aylward (stephen.aylward@kitware.com) and Heang-Ping Chan (chanhp@umich.edu) and provide the following information:

Title of the demo
Names and affiliations (name of institute, city, country) of the demonstrators
Short description of the demo, one paragraph minimum. Make sure it clearly describes the technology and application area of the demo. You may cite or include a paper describing the demo.
Optionally, describe the public data used in the development or evaluation of the system. Include a link to the data or to a page that describes how to access that data.

Important Dates

January 20, 2012: Deadline for submitting proposals.

January 25, 2012: Notification of acceptance.

February 2, 2012: Deadline for submitting two summary slides for the opening presentation.

More information

For more information, including instructions on proposing a live demonstration, visit the workshop website at:

http://www.kitware.com/workshops/SPIE_CAD_2012.html

The National Alliance for Medical Image Computing's All-Hands Meeting

Stephen Aylward — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:08:05 -0500

Several Kitwareans are attending the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing's (NA-MIC's) All-Hands Meeting in Salt Lake City. At this meeting, we are promoting Slicer 4.0.1, the open-source medical image analysis and visualization platform that we released with other NA-MIC developers last week.

Over 100 attendees are at the NA-MIC meeting and using Slicer4 for traumatic brain injury assessment, image-guided surgery, head and neck radiation therapy planning, atrial fibrillation analysis, and more. Our developments in Qt, Python, and image analysis algorithms have been very well received. For more information on the event, the projects, and the attendees from academia and industry, follow this link.

On-going highlights from the meeting include the following:

Julien Finet and Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin have done an outstanding job presenting Slicer4 and working with users to created new modules and to apply them to challenging medical imaging problems:

Danielle Pace is supporting and extending our sliding-organ registration research and TubeTK, finding new collaborators, and working with UCLA on traumatic brain injury applications.
Benjamin Long presented his work on automated GUI testing using Qt and Python. The work is derived from the methods developed by the ParaView team.
Stephen Aylward is working on TubeTK and giving a presentation on "NA-MIC Software Processes and Future Plans" to the NA-MIC External Advisory Board and representatives from the NIH. He is also seeking out new collaborations and applications.

Kitware Participates in RSNA 2011

Katie Osterdahl — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:18:42 -0500

Several members of the Kitware team attended RSNA from November 27-December 2. In addition to meeting with collaborators and exploring the exhibits, we were actively involved in demonstrating our newest work, teaching workshops and participating in exhibits.

On Monday, Kitware taught two courses, "Open Source Applications for Medical Imaging Research" and “Introduction to Open-Source Software Libraries for Medical Imaging”. These courses had sold-out audiences with over 100 attendees and received high acclaim.

In the open-source applications course, Rick Avila, Wes Turner, Julien Finet, and Patrick Reynolds presented. Topics presented included VolView, Midas, KiwiViewer/VES, and Slicer. For the VoView tutorial attendees viewed and analyzed medical images donated from the "Give-A-Scan" project for lung cancer research. The tutorial covered basic image viewing functionality, and introduced the idea of using and developing VolView extensions for additional analysis capabilities. For the KiwiViewer tutorial, attendees saw how VTK is being extended (via VES) to support mobile and web-based applications. The power of Midas was demonstrated for collecting, processing, and sharing data in a manner that fits with medical imaging research workflows. The course also featured the recent 4.0 release of Slicer and illustrated its new Qt-based user interface, improved speed, and increased ease of use.

For the open-source libraries course, Patrick, Julien, and Rick presented several open-source software libraries used in medical imaging, including the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), Midas, and VES. The course addressed managers, clinicians, researchers and scientists who direct and conduct the development of new medical image analysis and display applications. Highlighting the value of these open-source toolkits in medical imaging, we discussed the rigorous software processes used to ensure stability in the toolkits and specific applications of the toolkits to medical imaging. Participants were engaged with live demonstrations of coding of SimpleITK and new features of VES.

In addition to the courses we taught, we also had a presence in the Quantitative Imaging Reading Room (QIRR) with two exhibits. The first exhibit, “3D Slicer: An open-source software platform for segmentation, registration, quantitative analysis and 3D visualization of biomedical image data,” was a collaborative exhibit with the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC). At the exhibit, Julien Finet introduced translational clinical researchers to the capabilities of the 3D Slicer software at meet-the-experts sessions. A team of 3D Slicer experts ran hands-on demonstrations with sample datasets or, where appropriate, data provided by attendees. The demonstrations included volume rendered head, thoracic and abdominal CT scans, MRI-based topographic parcellation of a human brain, PET/CT quantitative assessment of tumor response, image-guided prostate interventions, longitudinal analysis of meningioma growth, white matter exploration for neurosurgical planning using Diffusion Tensor Imaging tractography, and registration and segmentation strategies for follow-up on cases of Traumatic Brain Injuries (see our RSNA page on the Wiki). This was a timely exhibit as it coincided with the official announcement of the Slicer 4.0 release, a major new release in the 3D Slicer series (see our earlier post on this topic.)

The second exhibit, "Understanding and Improving CT Image Quality With Automated Pocket Phantom Technology," presented research on our 2nd generation CT pocket phantom. CT volumetric performance is highly influenced by fundamental acquisition properties, such as resolution. By combining this small form factor, accurate artifact with automated detection and measurement algorithms, we were able to demonstrate the ability to accurately measure, and continuously monitor CT acquisition quality. Future algorithms will build on this research to automatically characterize and correct for image acquisition variability.

RSNA 2011 was an exciting event, notably because of the connections we made or cultivated while in Chicago, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all there again next year!

Slicer 4.0 Now Available

Katie Osterdahl — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:54:56 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce the availability of Slicer 4.0 binaries on the Slicer download page. Spearheaded at Kitware by Julien Finet and Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin, Slicer 4.0 is a major new release in the 3D Slicer series where improvements to performance, robustness, and usability have been key.

TractographyDisplay module in action.

Source: http://wiki.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Documentation/4.0/Modules/TractographyDisplay

Slicer 4.0 contains a new graphical user interface (built using the Qt toolkit), a refactoring of the Slicer core that touched nearly every line of the code base, a new layout manager, a simplified Python interface, and numerous other noteworthy additions and enhancements. A detailed list of improvements can be found on the Slicer wiki, along with additional documentation for Slicer 4.0.

Developed in collaboration with the National Association for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) and the broader Slicer community, Slicer 4.0 is an open-source (BSD-style license) platform for medical image segmentation, registration, visualization, and analysis. It represents a practical integration of innovations from a multitude of fields, including medical image analysis, cross-platform software development, collaborative software development, and extensible platform design. Kitware employees and products are at the heart of many of these innovations.

If you wish to explore opportunities for expanding your research or commercial developments using Slicer, please contact Stephen Aylward for consultation.

Volume Rendering applied to Knee Atlas
Source: http://www.slicer.org/publications/item/view/1953

Surgery planning using DTI tractography

Scripting 3D Slicer with Python
Source: http://www.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/SampleData

The Insight Journal Reaches 500 Published Articles!

Julien Jomier — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 14:41:53 -0500

The Insight Journal just received its 500th paper on November 30th!

This marks a milestone on the progress of Open Science and the promotion of Reproducibility in Scientific Research. The wide adoption of the Insight Journal by the ITK community is evidence that progress is possible, and that a community of committed individuals can trigger and sustain change.

The idea of the Insight Journal originated from the initial experience of implementing many image analysis algorithms in ITK, and realizing how insufficient traditional journal publications are when it comes to specifying the software implementation of any algorithm. At the time, it was quite evident that something has been lost in the practice of scientific research: The fundamental rule by which a researcher should communicate the outcome of her research work by describing it in enough detail for anyone else to be able to replicate it. The popularization of software as a day-to-day tool in the practice of scientific research has not been followed by a corresponding modernization in the means of publishing scientific results. The standard publication venues were still: 10 pages papers at single space, two columns with black and white static images, and it took two years for them to go from submission to publication.

The Insight Journal was conceived as a quantum leap in technical and scientific publications, by asking the fundamental question of "What would you need in order to replicate the work described by the authors? ". When attempting to answer this question, very quickly it became evident that we needed: (a) all source code, (b) input data, and (c) parameters; used in the computation of the original work, and that all these materials should be made available to both reviewers and readers.

The Journal readily adopted, what was at the time the nascent Open Access movement, and chose to enable authors to keep the copyright of their papers, and license them for any one to use, under the terms of the Creative Commons by Attribution License.

The Journal also implemented an infrastructure for systematically testing the source code accompanying every submitted paper. Since every paper is expected to be submitted with source code, data and parameters, it becomes possible for the Insight Journal infrastructure to extract the source code from a paper submission, configure and build the code, and then proceed to run it on the input data that is also provided by the authors along with the paper. The results of the entire process are then posted online as a first review of the paper.

Another novelty of the Insight Journal was to revert the order of publication and review. That is, instead of waiting for a paper to be reviewed before it gets to be published, in the Insight Journal, the paper is first published online (within 24 hours after submission), and then it is open for public peer-review by the community. The reviews are public and non-anonymous, and evolve into a forum-like conversation. Authors are also allowed and encouraged to post revisions to their papers, in particular as a response to comments posted by the reviewers.

With the visionary support of the National Library of Medicine, in the form of A2D2 funding, the Insight Journal came online in 2005. The first fully open-access, reproducible article was published in July 2005. Now, six years later, the Insight Journal has reached 500 published articles. This represents an average of over 80 published papers a year.

With 2,480 registered users, and 819 community reviews, the Insight Journal has become an integral part of the ecosystem surrounding the Insight Toolkit. This is the direct mechanism for community members to share their developments with their peers. This level of adoption clearly shows that there is a community that truly appreciates the importance of reproducibility in the practice of scientific research, and understands that the main purpose of publishing is to share information with their peers, not to be used as a surrogate for measuring productivity.

Over the past five years, the Insight Journal has become a central place for open-access and has been hosting open-access articles for the MICCAI conferences and other events. We have also extended the Insight Journal to other open-source communities with the VTK Journal and are looking to extend it further.

Continuing on this success we have recently made several improvements to the Insight Journal. In particular we are trying to keep the website up to date with the latest technology and integrate authors and readers suggestions. We are looking forward to adding another 500 articles to the Journal.

The Insight Journal was made possible thanks to the visionary support Dr. Terry Yoo, at the National Library of Medicine via the following grants and support contracts:

A2D2 Journal - 2005
ITK Maintenance Contract 2006-2009 - N01-LM-4-3508
ITK Maintenance Contract 2009-2010 - HHSN276200900852P
ITK Maintenance Contract 2010-2011 - HHSN276201000516U

This committed support to the creation of Reproducible Research Journals preceded the current renaissance of appreciation for reproducibility in Science.

Software Forethought

Will Schroeder — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:56:00 -0400

Here's an all too common scenario. A bunch of really smart scientists and medical researchers get together. They envision a research program of unprecedented scale. They obtain funding, tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, from academic, commercial, non-profit enterprises, and from investors and philanthropists. The plans are drawn up, brick and mortar is under design and soon to be built! And at some point the data starts flooding in.....

Oops there's a problem, what to do about the data, how do we maintain provenance, analyze, visualize, and share it? How are we going build reproducible software systems and translate our research to application? Well let's just hire some software folks, they'll take care of it, we'll provide computing budgets for the scientists with which to buy software, we've budgeted a cluster (what more do you want after all?), we might even hire a computer scientist or two! In the mean time some of the more tech savvy scientists (never formally trained in software process) will start writing some code. And so it goes, we muddle along.

Just another case of software as an afterthought. I've seen this scenario in action much too often across groups ranging in scale from small research teams to large research institutions. To be blunt (and gentler then many deserve) the results are predictably poor: primitive computing and visualization capabilities, lost data, fractured and incompatible workflows, non existent software processes, inefficient collaboration methods, and poor science. It makes you want to cry for the waste of talent and resources, not to mention the missed scientific discoveries and the possibility of better health care outcomes.

I think it's time to make software cosiderations a forethought, a fundamental driver of the scientific process. I'm convinced doing so will unleash a torrent of innovation. For a long time the scientific process, consisting of theory, experiment and computing (and maybe a data-intensive scientific discovery if you ascribe to the fourth paradigm) has been driven by the experimentalists and theorists, and computing has gone along for the ride. But more and more science is computationally driven, yet I don't think we've reflected this in our thinking, and more importantly in the way we do science. It seems pretty clear to me: it's time to place software and computing front and center in the practice of science, and then work with the theorists and experimentalists to solve their problems using the full potentail of computing technology.

You probably think I'm making this stuff up (I'm not) and being overly dramatic (I am, but it's a blog after all)! For example, today I attended the dazzling, public announcement of the New York Genome Center. This $125 million venture allies some of the most brilliant minds in the genomics field, along with leading commercial, academic and research institutions. It is truly amazing, exciting and inspiring to see this come together, and I expect someday Kitware will be a part of it (after all it's in our New York back yard and they desparately need us, they just don't know it yet).

However as a scientific computing professional I can't help but be concerned. How many software/computing institutions are founders of this Center? How many computational scientists are in leadership positions (as indicated from the biographies handed out at the event)? Zero and zero. More worrying, during the presentations there were all the tell-tale signs of software as an afterthought. Phrases referring to software as a challenge and a limiting concern; vague statements about data sharing plans; and a singular lack of recognition that to a large degree, understanding the genome is a computing problem. As a computational scientist sensitized to these code words, they are strong signals that software will come late to the party (once the data comes flooding in). It could be that there is much going on behind the scenes, everything is under control, and I'm wrong (again) about this, but I've seen software treated as an afterthought too often to not get my spider senses tingling.

As data becomes larger and our modeling and understanding of systems more complex, the computing problem grows in importance. The point is fast approaching (that is, if we are not there already) where the innovation bottleneck will be computing, in particular software. Thus without progress on this front, the worst case scenario is that adding more theory and experimentation will do little to advance science and the medical arts. To make progress we need to break through the computing bottleneck by treating it as the serious challenge that it is.

My recommendation is that we have to think about software proactively. If you are forming a research enterprise, include a software computing professional in a leadership position, or look around and add one to your board. Alternatively engage scientific computing organizations in which software and big data are core competencies. With the right mix of people, organizations, and considered forethought, this Center and many other research initiatives like it can succeed beyond our wildest imaginings.

ITK v4 - Crowdsourcing Documentation

Julien Jomier — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:17:22 -0400

To help members of the community use the new version of the toolkit, Kitware and the ITK development team designed and implemented a system for crowdsourcing documentation, whose release we are now pleased to announce. The purpose of the crowdsourcing system is to allow the community to suggest changes to the documentation and improve its quality.

How to Use it?

You can access the crowdsourcing documentation pages directly from the auto-generated doxygen documentation for ITKv4. Go on a class page and click on “Edit comments”:

Figure 1: ITK doxygen page.

You will then be able to dynamically edit the source code of the class by clicking the “pencil” icon on the text editor on the right side of the page, and providing your email address and some comments describing your motivation for the change.

Once submitted, the change will be reviewed by the ITK team.

Figure 2: Documentation edition page.

How Does it Work?

The crowdsourcing page displays the code and documentation that is generated each night based on the content of the ITK Git repository, including any recent changes made by the developers community:

Figure 3: Functional diagram of the crowdsourcing documentation system.

When a visitor to the crowdsourcing page makes an edit, the system creates a doxygen preview and submits a new patch to Gerrit, a web-based code review system. The ITK team then reviews the change directly on Gerrit, and can make further improvements to it, or simply merge it with the main codebase.

The new crowdsourcing system is yet another mechanism for encouraging the participation of the community, and enabling all to help improve the quality both in form and content of the doxygen documentation. We invite and encourage everyone to make use of the new crowdsourcing system and contribute improvements to the documentation that is so vital for facilitating good use of the toolkit. Given the thousands of ITK community members, we anticipate that this venue will become a high volume source of improvements to the documentation.

We'd like to give a special thanks to Arnaud Gelas for suggesting the initial ideas for the system and for following up on the implementation. Thanks also to Charles Marion, who designed and implemented most of the system and Kitware’s team: Matt Bowman, Matt McCormick, David Cole, and Luis Ibanez.

ITK v4 Announcement: http://www.kitware.com/news/home/browse/ITK?2011_10_04&ITKv4+Beta+Now+Available
Download ITK : http ://www.itk .org

ITK v4 - Migration Guide

Julien Jomier — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:34:38 -0400

The ITK community recently released the Beta version of its new ITKv4 effort. The Insight Toolkit (ITK) is an open-source, cross-platform system that provides an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis.

To help members of the community use the new version of the toolkit, Kitware and the ITK team developed a Migration Guide (http://itk.org/migrationv4), whose release we are pleased to announce. The purpose of the Migration Guide website is to list all changes made to the API of ITK between version 3.20 and version 4.0. This listing also includes the typical changes that ITK community members should apply to their ITK-3.20-based code to make it compatible with ITKv4. The Migration Guide is powered by the open source solution phpMyFaq ( http://www.phpmyfaq.de).

Its main features are presented below.

Up-to-date Information

The Migration Guide automatically updates its content based on the changes made by the community in the ITK Git repository:

As developers merge any changes that involve API modifications into the ITK Git repository, they are required to also include XML descriptions of those changes. These XML files contain essential information about the nature of the API change, and the impact of using the new code from ITK applications. The XML files are automatically submitted to the system hosting the Migration Guide and are processed in order to generate the web pages that are then made openly available for community members to browse.

What You Can Find on a Migration Post

Each change made by a developer is linked to a file explaining the change. The Migration Guide formats this file and displays the following information:

A detailed description of the API change
Examples of the previous and the new way to use the API
A list of the modified files in the ITK Library and related changes
A link to the Gerrit patch which contains additional information regarding the validation of the change, and the development discussion that led to the modification

All these pieces of information were identified as the elements that community members would need to know in order to easily migrate their applications from ITK 3.20 to ITKv4.0.

Share and Comment

As a community, we need to share, criticize, revise, and improve these vital pieces of information. We hope that the tools we added here will help readers have a smooth transition during their process of adopting ITKv4.0.

Finding Information

The Migration Guide uses a powerful search system that enables users to find the information they need. The website also uses dynamic tools for communicating with the search engines, allowing the information to be available in their search results.

ITK v4 Announcement: http://www.kitware.com/news/home/browse/ITK?2011_10_04&ITKv4+Beta+Now+Available
Download ITK : http://itk.org
Migration Guide: http://itk.org/migrationv4
Wiki : http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_Release_4/Users_Migration_Guide

VES: Development in Iterations

Pat Marion — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:18:55 -0400

My name Is Pat Marion; I’m an engineer at Kitware and part of the VES team. VES is the VTK OpenGL ES 2.0 Rendering Toolkit. We’ve already released a 0.0.2 version of KiwiViewer, the demonstration app for VES, on iPhone and iPad, available in the App store. We have a lot of things coming soon, including KiwiViewer for the Android market and new demos to show at VisWeek 2011. Here's a sneak peak at one of the demos-

The VES git repo will be released early next month after another round or two of iterations. We’ve been doing a lot of iterations (usually just one or two weeks in length) for the past eight weeks to push VES forward as quickly as possible.

Here’s how the iterations proceed in our git repo: a new a topic branch is created and owned by one of the VES team members. Work-in-progress on the topic is staged so that other team members can try the feature, or simply read through the code. Next, iterate (duh!) - the topic is merged to master as soon as we’re comfortable so that everyone can base new work on it.

At this early stage in development, it is to everyone’s benefit to merge early. We keep a close eye on valgrind and benchmark the frames-per-second so that we never lose performance. Who cares if the merge comes with a few loose ends; those will be tied up in the next iteration, which starts now!

And so, here we are, iterating on our code at high speed to prepare demos for VisWeek. Last week I added support for 2D text annotations using VTK’s freetype classes. The annotations can be anchored to 3D points on a mesh, allowing for updated annotation positions as the camera moves around the scene. This feature was demonstrated in the demo video linked above.

Another demo in the iteration pipeline is basic animation support. Using ParaView’s animation controls, you can export animation geometries for viewing on mobile devices. The animation timeline is controlled with touch interaction, and in the next iteration we want to flex the VES render-to-texture functionality to generate keyframe thumbnails along the timeline.

We’ll be showing these demos and more at VisWeek, including a 3D image slice widget and a mesh clipping widget, so we’ll see you there in Rhode Island! Come find us and our iPad and Android tablets at the Kitware table and stay tuned for a source code release announcement. As always, if you are interested in learning more about VES and our mobile visualization capabilities, please contact Kitware for more information.

The Insight Journal 3.0

Charles Marion — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:04:13 -0400

Kitware’s data publishing team is pleased to announce the release of a new major version the Insight Journal. The Insight Journal is an open access journal covering scientific domains from visualization to image computing. Since its launch in 2006, the Insight Journal (IJ) has become a central resource for scientific developers around the world. Nowadays, the IJ counts more than 2300 users and hosts more than 490 publications and 840 reviews. The unique characteristics of the IJ include free and open access to not only articles and reviews but also datasets and source code. The IJ also encourages open peer-review and invites discussion between reviewers and authors in order to make the published algorithms better. The IJ supports continuous revision of articles, code, and reviews allowing developers to always find state-of-the art algorithms.

After the success of the journal for the Insight Toolkit (ITK) community, the IJ recently opened its doors to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) community with the VTK Journal as well as a broader community of image computing methods. The IJ has also been hosting papers for workshop at the international conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) since 2007.

This major release continues to focus on the dissemination of scientific open data while improving the overall user experience using new web technologies such as CSS3 or HTML5. These new features are presented below.

Figure 1: Insight Journal integration with GIT

Better code integration with GIT

GIT is a fast, open-source, distributed version control system that is quickly replacing subversion (SVN) in open source and corporate programming communities. We have integrated GIT into the Insight Journal allowing authors to directly link their publication with a public GIT repository. This allows authors to develop and improve the algorithms and link specific revisions of the code to a publication in the Insight Journal. The IJ also continues to support traditional upload (as archive files) of source code and automatically extract the source code and push it to a GitHub repository allowing readers to browse, follow and fork the code very easily. Linked GIT repositories are also mirrored on GitHub in order to keep the original copy of the code (in case the linked repository disappears in the future). Figure 1 shows how the IJ interacts with the different GIT repositories.

Quick comment and rating

In the previous version of the IJ, only full reviews were allowed, which required a detailed explanation of the review. While we kept this feature, we have also added a quick and easy way to comment on publications directly on the publication’s page. We hope that this feature will help the readers to interact more directly with the authors. We also added a quick rating system based on thumbs up/down buttons to allow the users to rate a publication without having to post a full review.

Easier login with Google OpenID

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience. We have integrated OpenID authentication with the IJ to allow authors and reviewers to login easily using their Google account. To do so, simply click on the link located on the top of the main page. The traditional registration and login process is also still valid.

Social Sharing

The web is becoming more and more social and, while the IJ had social sharing buttons available, we have improved the interface and added new networks such as Google+ and Twitter. We have also added a quick way to send pre-formatted emails regarding a specific publication to collaborators and colleagues.

Improved Search

In this new release, we have focused our attention on improving the visibility of the publications on the major search engines. We have also developed and integrated a new search engine to quickly find related publications. Thanks to this new engine based on the open-source solution Lucene, the IJ is now searchable via a powerful query language and search can now be done on the full-text (PDF) of the publication.

Example of a search query:

title:select* AND keyword:registration AND NOT keyword:"Non-rigid Registration"

Faster User Interface

In order to improve the overall user experience, we have made several changes to the user interface including:

Faster layout using new CSS3 features
Better display of information on the publication page
Improved overall page loading time
Auto-saving feature when reviewing a publication (no more lost reviews)
New citation export tools (XML, Bibtex, etc.)

Figure 2: New Insight Journal interface

Sponsors and Acknowledgments

This work has been funded by the National Library of Medicine (NLM/NIH) under the contract HHSN276201000516U.

The Insight Journal development team would like to thank authors and reviewers who submitted feedback and bug reports.