Kitware News

VTK 5.10 Now Available

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware and the VTK team are pleased to announce the release of VTK 5.10. This release contains new and updated classes, utility improvements, and other enhancements.

In the 5.10 release, the Google Summer of Code 2011 work by David Lonie and Tharindu de Silva has been incorporated into VTK. David developed chemical structure visualization code, which adds accelerated rendering of 3D chemical geometry using standard chemical representations. Tharindu worked on the 2D chart and plot features in VTK, improving chart interaction and adding support for keyboard modifiers to mouse and key events.

There was a new set of image rendering classes incorporated for use in the next generation of VTK-based image viewer applications. Like VTK's volume rendering classes, the new image rendering classes consist of separate actor, mapper, and property classes for maximum flexibility. The VTK tea

InnerOptic and Kitware to Develop Needle-Guidance System that Targets Hepatic Tumors

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

InnerOptic Technology and Kitware are pleased to announce Phase II SBIR funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the development of a needle guidance system for hepatic tumor ablation. The operating room ready system will provide novel 3D visualizations for needle guidance in soft tissues.

Using InnerOptic’s Spotlight™ technology, which was developed during Phase I of this grant, intra-operative ultrasound images will be fused with pre-operative computed tomography (CT) images. The Spotlight system renders opaquely and in sharp detail only the portions of the CT data that are in the vicinity of the ultrasound probe or the needle trajectory. This is analogous to a spotlight on stage: illuminating the scene of interest, while the rest of the stage is transparent and out-of-focus to be less distracting.

During liver lesion ablations and other image-guided procedures, surgeons and

Midas 3.2.6 Release Now Available

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The Midas team is pleased to announce the Midas 3.2.6 release. This release features security and stability improvements and other upgrades to enhance the Midas user experience.

The community descriptions functionality was enhanced and the upload workflow was streamlined. These two features are vital to Midas, and the updates provide a much better user experience. To further increase the user-friendliness of the system, the team added more batch move, merge, copy, and edit operations to folder views, as well as making the folder view sortable.

For those interested in tailoring their Midas installations themselves, the Midas team added a plugin for landing pages and the ability to render Midas without the default layout. There is also new web-api functionality to download by hash.

In the Midas 3.2.6 release there are a number of other changes and issues that have been resolved, and the full list is available in the change

Kitware to Develop Cosmology Analysis Framework for DOE

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the award of $150,000 in SBIR funding from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the development of a cosmology analysis framework for in-situ analysis and data-reduction of cosmological simulations. Such simulations play an important role in the DOE’s High Energy Physics Cosmic Frontier program and are critical for understanding dark energy.

Cosmological observations currently produce terabytes of data per simulation, and data size is predicted to grow to exascale within a decade. The DOE needs an infrastructure in place to realize, encapsulate, and interpret the enormous wealth of information contained in such massive datasets. Traditional workflows run simulation codes for days and analysis is performed as a post-processing step.

This project requires an evolutionary shift in the way cosmological predictions are obtained, and therefore addresses critical

Tom Munnecke: Towards a Federal Health Information Space

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

On Tuesday, April 24th, OSEHRA will host Tom Munnecke, one of the world’s leading experts in health information technology, as he presents his observations and lessons learned as one of the original architects of VistA and CHCS, as well as his thoughts on their future evolution.

He will present an architectural conceptual model based on an "Information Space" rather than a "Integrated System." In this model, we approach the federal health information as a large-scale, fine-grained network of information and interactions. He will also discuss some of the unique issues of the massive scale in the federal health care system - how we can use it to our advantage, as well as the pitfalls it brings.

Join us from 12:30-1:45 PM EDT for Towards a Federal Health Information Space. Register with GotoMeeting to reserve your spot today, as space is limited. After registering you will receive a confirmation email containin

CMake 2.8.8 is Now Available

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

On behalf of the Kitware team and global CMake community, we are pleased to announce the release of CMake 2.8.8. There are several significant developments and enhancements with this release, including greatly improved CPack documentation and a new Ninja generator on Linux.

This release also includes an easy way to generate a package config file with CMakePackageConfigHelpers and build MSVC-compatible dlls with MinGW gfortran in CMakeAddFortranSubdirectory. The team added support for Xcode 4.3, which also has a new default location and directory structure.

There are several improvements to the find_package command, such as a new module mode and clearer error messages, making CMake more user-friendly. Additionally, the Find modules are much cleaner, with the effort focused on th

Slicer 4.1 Released

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, in collaboration with the National Association for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) and the Slicer community, is happy to announce the release of Slicer 4.1. This release brings a new level of stability to Slicer and new features to enhance its usability and functionality.

Notable changes in this release include the addition of the Extension Manager, which enables Slicer extensions to be downloaded and installed from within Slicer. To support extension contributions from the community, an “extension catalog” server (similar to an app store) is running to host uploaded contributions from Slicer developers. Built on Kitware’s Midas technology, the “extension catalog” makes it easier for the community to search, find, rate, comment, and download relevant extensions.

Kitware to Improve DOE Knowledgebase System

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce $150,000 in Phase I SBIR funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The funding will be used to improve the DOE’s Systems Biology Knowledgebase (Kbase), a community-driven cyberinfrastructure for sharing and integrating biology and genetics data.

The project will specifically address the critical need of extracting meaningful knowledge from ever-growing volumes of scientific data by making improvements to Kbase. Three distinct improvements will be made to Kbase, including the design and incorporation of a new cloud-based architecture for genetics algorithms, integration of new visualization tools, and the ability to link algorithms to existing databases.

This Phase I effort will investigate the design of these new components and demonstrate how they will work by testing a sampling of algorithms prov

Kitware to Develop Simulation Workflow for the Department of Energy

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware today announces $150,000 in Phase 1 SBIR funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. The funding will be used to enable widespread adoption of high performance computing (HPC) functionality for small and medium-sized manufacturing firms by providing a suite of open source applications that address the complete simulation lifecycle. The project will address current hurdles of technology integration, interaction, and scalability.

The manufacturing industry has benefitted from the use of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE) technologies in terms of reducing the time and cost of development, while also increasing reliability. However, its full potential has yet to be realized due to the high costs currently associated with end-to-end workflow systems that restrict the majority of small to mid-sized manufacturing organizations, and the systems’ non-intuitive nature for researchers who are not simulation experts.

Additionally, the complexity and

Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization (SDAV) Institute

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware announced its involvement in the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. The project will be led by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and is a collaboration between prominent government laboratory, university, and industry partners for the purpose of creating a comprehensive set of tools and techniques that are essential for knowledge discovery on the DOE’s various computing platforms over the next five years.

The SDAV Institute’s primary goals are to actively work with application teams and assist them in achieving breakthrough science; and to provide technical solutions in data management, analysis, and visualization, all of which are broadly used by the computational science community. Such expertise is required to address the

ITK 4.1.0 Released

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

On behalf of the ITK community, Kitware and the ITK team are happy to announce the release of the Insight Toolkit 4.1.0! This release is the first since ITK 4.0.0 and includes a number of improvements and new features. Additionally, this is the first release to deviate from the even-only minor release number, an effect of transitioning to Git.

Notable improvements in this release include better VTK Bridge and WrapITK support, a new deconvolution filtering module with several classes, and a new TimeVaryingBSplineVelocityFieldTransform. There are also enhancements to the Registrationv4 and LevelSetsv4 frameworks, and a new video filtering module that includes a method to use standard filters in a video pipeline. Additionally, InsightApplications (from the ITKApps repository) has also seen a number of updates to ITKv4. <

OSEHRA Announces First Board of Directors

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is a proud member of the OSEHRA team and is redistributing this release on behalf of the organization.

OSEHRA, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating innovation in electronic health record software, today named three industry leaders to its inaugural board of directors.

The Honorable James Peake, MD, Senior Vice President with CGI Group, Inc., Dr. John Halamka, MD, MS, Chief Information Officer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Michael O’Neill, Senior Advisor with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Innovation Initiative (VAi2) have each been appointed to OSEHRA’s board of directors. In addition, Lieutenant General (Dr.) Charles Green, Surgeon General of the U.S. Air Force, will serve as Department of Defense liaison to the OSEHRA board. Dr. Peake will s

CDash 2.0.2 Now Available

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of CDash 2.0.2! CDash is the open-source, web-based software testing server that aggregates, analyzes and displays the results of software testing processes submitted from clients around the world, conveying the state of a software system and allowing continuous improvements in its quality. The main CDash server for open-source projects is now hosting more than 30 projects and my.cdash.org is hosting more than 380 projects including KDE, Amarok and Lapack dashboards.

The 2.0.2 release has several enhancements and adds new features to the software. To make CDash more user-friendly, there is an improved and simplified layout. This coincides with improved user administration, better management of asynchronous submissions and imp

ParaView 3.14 Released

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware and the ParaView team are pleased to announce the release of ParaView 3.14. This release features usability enhancements, improvements to the Plugin framework, new panels, and more than 100 other resolved issues, which can be found in the change log. In tandem with the 3.14 announcement is the release of the new ParaView 3.14 Users’ Guide eBook, available through Kitware’s online store.

ParaView 3.14 features a redesigned Find Data dialog and Color Editor. The updated Find Data dialog makes it possible to use complex queries to select elements, including combining multiple test cases with Boolean operations. The Color Editor, used to edit lookup tables or color tables for scalar mapping, now enables independent editing o

Kitware Introduces Visomics for Bioinformatics

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to introduce “Visomics,” an open-source application for performing biological research pertaining to genomics, protemomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics.

Visomics is built on top of Kitware’s powerful open-source toolkits and is easily configured to support underlying ‘omics applications, which can be customized to meet the particular needs of researchers. Currently in alpha/beta mode, Visomics provides the statistical methods, intuitive visualizations, and pre-existing chemical pathway diagrams that biologists need for the tracking, storage, analysis and evaluation of relationships and behaviors of large numbers of analytes and biomarkers.

Clinical researchers are using currently Visomics to delve deep into the areas of reproductive and perinatal health, cardiovascular disorders and breast cancer. By leveraging Visomics

Midas 3.2.2 Now Available

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Midas team is pleased to announce the release of Midas 3.2.2. This minor release focuses on usability enhancements, making Midas more user-friendly and responsive to users’ needs.

This release features improved item and folder management, so it is easier to organize your uploaded files. There is also better user and group management to enable more effective control over permissions and file access. To tie into these updates, there are new administrative options to fine-tune the Midas user experience and the log and metadata views have been optimized.

With the 3.2.2 release, there is an improved batch processing infrastructure and support for DICOM images. Several issues related to large file uploading have been resolved. There are also a number of other changes and issues that have been fixed in Midas 3.2.2. The full list is available in the change l

Kitware Announces Debut of KiwiViewer in Android Market

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of KiwiViewer in the Android Market. With this release, Android device users can explore scientific and medical datasets in an intuitive, natural manner. In addition to the full functionality of KiwiViewer, this release features several enhancements, including new demos and features. The application supports Android 2.2 and later.

There are new built-in visualization demos, including a brain atlas viewer, a time-series simulation animation, and a 3D image slice plane widget. New file formats are now supported, including polygon and MetaImage. For a complete description of supported file formats, please see the documentation page.

Additionally, the Android release features Kitware is pleased to announce their participation in developing the animation “NSF/DOE Community Atmospheric Model: Total Precipitable Water” for the Climate Science Computational End Station (CCES). The video shows results from a CAM simulation that was run at Argonne National Laboratory. This research was recently presented as part of the keynote address at the 92^nd American Meteorological Society Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The animation of the simulation results was created by Joseph Insley of Argonne, with help from Andy Bauer of Kitware, using Kitware’s open source data analysis and visualization application, ParaView. This research project is being conducted by a collaborative group from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Sandia National Laboratories, Argonne National Laboratory, and Kitware.

In order to model such a complex system, the simulation code required 25 million core hour

Kitware Welcomes New Team Member in January

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware welcomed Leo Liu to the team in January. Leo joined the Carrboro office as an R&D Engineer on the Scientific Computing team. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with a dissertation focused on computations of Delanunay and higher order triangulations, with applications to splines.

Kitware is excited to welcome Leo to the team! Kitware is growing and looking for enthusiastic and motivated individuals to join our team. There are a variety of open positions in computer vision, scientific visualization, medical imaging, and informatics. For more information on our current opportunities, please visit our website. Interested applicants should send a cover letter and resume to jobs@kitware.com for consideration.

Kitware Receives Phase II Funding for the Development of a Computational Chemistry Workbench

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been awarded $730,000 in Phase II SBIR funding from the U.S. Army Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC). This funding will be used for the continued development of an end-to-end workbench solution aimed at a wide range of chemists, from students right up to computational chemists.

Chemists have traditionally relied on an array of tools and databases that result in fragmented workflows, lost data, and databases that are too difficult to navigate. Without a comprehensive system, these problems will continue to prevail as new computational tools and more comprehensive databases become available.

As part of this funding, Kitware will develop a suite of applications and libraries under the banner of Open Chemistry. Together the components will form an open, extensible application framework that puts computational tools, data, and domain specific knowledge at the fingertips of chemists. The framework will leverage existing computational chemistry tools to perform ca

Kitware Announces Open-Source Release of VES & KiwiViewer

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

The Kitware team is pleased to announce the source code release for VES and KiwiViewer. VES is the VTK OpenGL ES rendering toolkit, designed to deliver scientific and medical visualization capabilities to mobile application developers. KiwiViewer is the interactive application built on VES for exploring geometric datasets on multi-touch mobile devices.

As a lightweight platform for building interactive visualizations, VES leverages the visualization algorithms available in VTK and the rendering capabilities of mobile hardware. The VES framework contains a rendering library built on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, an application framework library for developing interactive visualization applications, and a lightweight viewer for iOS, Android, and Linux platforms.

Kiwi platform provides mobile application developers with building blocks for embedding advanced visualization windows into Android or iOS apps. The Kiwi platf

Kitware Collaborates with NREL on Software Process for Radiance Project

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is starting a new collaborative effort with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a facility of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), on implementing important back-end software processes for the Radiance Project.

Originally developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) under DOE funding, Radiance provides lighting engineers and researchers worldwide with physically-based simulation tools for daylighting, electric lighting and energy analysis of buildings. The project's principal author was Greg Ward of Anyhere Software, who continues to provide oversight to the project's evolution.

CMake was implemented by Kitware and NREL as part of their efforts to incorporate Radiance-based simulation capabilities within OpenStudio, NREL's own open-source suite of software tools. The use of CMake for Radiance will allow for nightly building and testing of the Radiance HEAD release and will provide automatic updates of any detected build or testing errors.

"This

Slicer 4.0.1 is Now Available for Download

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, in collaboration with the National Association for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) and the Slicer community, is pleased to announce that Slicer 4.0.1 is available for download. Instructions for building Slicer 4.0.1. from the source code are found on the Slicer wiki.

Notable changes in Slicer 4.0.1 include new support for Ubuntu 11.04 and Fedora FC 13, and for DWI tractrography modules on Mac OS X. VTK GPU raycast method support of ATI GPU cards for Mac OS X is also included in this release, as well as major improvements to restoring scenes, which now provides significantly faster speeds.

Additionally, in Slicer 4.0.1, users can now drag-and-drop files, including volumes, meshes, annotations, etc., int

Employees Honored for 10 Years of Dedication

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

At the annual Holiday Party in December, Kitware honored two employees for their dedication to the company over the past ten years.

Sébastien Barré joined Kitware on September 1, 2001 after completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Poitiers (France). Sébastien's introduction to Kitware came through VTK as one of the first European contributors to the open-source project. Since joining Kitware, Sébastien has been an invaluable member of the medical imaging and software development teams, and recently has focused on user interface development. He is the primary architect of the company’s internal back-office software, KWiK, a critical component of the daily workflow at Kitware.

Luis Ibáñez joined Kitware on January 29, 2002 and is now a Technical Leader on the medical imaging team. Luis earned his

New Team Member Joins Kitware in December

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware welcomed Roland Kwitt to the team in December. Roland joined the Carrboro office as an R&D engineer, where he will be working on a variety of projects. He earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Salzburg, where he also received his master's of science. Roland’s research focuses on decision-theoretic formulations of computer-vision problems such as image retrieval and classification; medical image processing; statistical modeling; 3D LIDAR data processing; and autonomously driving vehicles.

Kitware is excited to welcome Roland to the team! In 2012, Kitware will still be looking for talented and motivated individuals for a variety of positions in computer vision, scientific visualization, medical imaging, and informatics. For more information on our current openings, please visit our website. Interested applicants should send a cover letter and resume to jobs@kitware.com

CMake 2.8.7 Now Available

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

On behalf of the Kitware development team and the rest of the CMake team from all around the world, we are pleased to announce that CMake 2.8.7 is now available. The software is available on the CMake download page on the website. This release features several notable developments, including improved Eclipse support and incremental improvements to the AUTOMOC feature that was added in the 2.8.6 release.

This release includes the addition of file(…) and string(…) commands for computing hash values and more cryptographic hash implementations, such as SHA1, SHA224, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512. There are new LINK_PUBLIC and LINK_PRIVATE options for target_link_libraries command as well as a new DeployQt4 module.

With the 2.8.7 release, there are two sets of installers for the Mac. The "Darwin" versions are for Mac OSX 10.4 and later, and

ITK 4.0 is Now Available and Ready for Download!

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, on behalf of the ITK team, is pleased to announce the release of ITK 4.0.0 and the availability of the binaries, which are now available for download on the ITK download page. This release is the outcome of 18 months of refactoring efforts, generously sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) with funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

New features included in ITK 4.0.0

Kitware Receives $181,700 for 3D Slicer Enhancements

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been awarded $181,700 in sub-recipient funding on a grant from the U.S. National Center of Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding will be used to make enhancements to 3D Slicer, an open-source platform for medical image segmentation, registration, visualization, and analysis. 3D Slicer is funded by grants associated with the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) and the Neuroimaging Analysis Center (NAC), and supported by extensive user and developer communities.

NA-MIC) and broader Slicer community, is pleased to announce the release of the Slicer 4.0 binaries. This is a major new release in the Slicer series that focused on perfomance improvements, enhanced robustness, and increased usability.

One of the major features of Slicer 4.0 is the new graphical user interface built with Qt. This new GUI provides a more user-friendly application and increases user efficiency. Additionally, the Slicer core has been refactored and the Python interface has been simplified.

This release also has numerous other enhancements, and the complete list can be found on the Slicer wiki. The updated documentation is also available on t

Kitware SAS Moves to Support Growth

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In response to recent growth, Kitware SAS has relocated to 26 rue Louis Guérin, 69100 Villeurbanne. The more spacious fourth floor office suite overlooks Lyon's Parc de la Tête d'Or, and is a short distance from the scientific campus of Lyon, La Doua. This area is home to the Claude Bernard University (UCBL), CPE Lyon and the National Institute for Applied Sciences (INSA). Villeurbanne is just north of Lyon, and the new office suite is located less than two miles from Kitware's previous Lyon office.

As a result of Kitware’s international growth, Kitware SAS recently added two new members to the team. Dr. Philippe Pébay join

Wesley Turner Appointed to SPIE Senior Membership

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Dr. Wesley Turner, a technical leader in the medical imaging group at Kitware, was recently elected as a Senior Member of SPIE, an international society for optics and photonics. Dr. Turner has been with Kitware since May 2006 and has contributed his technical expertise and management skills to projects that include the exploitation of CT and MRI patient scans, microscopy, and bioinformatics.

About SPIE
In 1955, the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) was founded to advance light-based technologies. Each year, the Society organizes 25 major international forums, trade exhibitions, and continuing education programs. SPIE also publishes a number of peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, reference volumes, tutorial texts, and more, which can be accessed through the SPIE Digital Lib

OSEHRA Debuts Weekly Teleconference Tomorrow

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The Open Source Electronic Health Record Agent (OSEHRA) will start a weekly teleconference to discuss the current set of OSEHRA software development tools on Wednesday, November 16 from 3:30pm to 4:30pm EST. This first meeting will provide an introduction to the many software development tools that are now available for VistA/M developers from the www.osehra.org website. This includes OSEHRA’s:

Source Code Repository based on Git (http://code.osehra.org/gitweb)
Software Quality Dashboard based on CDash (http://code.osehra.org/CDash/index.php?project=Open+Source+EHR)
Automated Vista/M Manual Pages (http://code.osehra.org/dox)
Code Review Tool based on Gerrit (

ParaView 3.12.0 is Now Available!

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware and the ParaView team are pleased to announce the availability of the final ParaView 3.12.0 binaries for download on the ParaView download page. This release features improvements to the ParaView ServerManager and includes more than 190 resolved issues, all of which can be found in the change-log. An updated user guide for 3.12.0 can also be found on the ParaView wiki.

ParaView 3.12.0 includes improvements to the underpinnings of the ParaView ServerManager. The communication layer beneath the ServerManager was upgraded to minimize communication, while making it easier to debug and trace messages exchanged be

Kitware Courses Move to Webinar Format

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware announced free monthly online introductory courses in September 2011, and within days all four scheduled courses for VTK, CMake, ParaView, and ITK were filled. To better handle the community demand, Kitware has switched to a webinar format allowing up to 100 attendees per session. The following sessions now have additional availability:

Introduction to CMake
November 9, 2011, 10:00-11:30 a.m. EST
This webinar has already happened - view the recorded session.

This course provides an introduction to the CMake cross-platform build tool used by many open-source and commercial development projects world-wide. Using a tutorial format, this course introduces the concept of the basic CMakeLists configuration file for a simple project, then expands upon this to cover set

Kitware Awarded Funding for Robot-Assisted Prostate Surgery Research

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has been awarded Phase I SBIR funding from NIBIB through a unique joint agency initiative of The National Institutes of Health (NIH), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of Homeland Security. The initial Phase I funding will be used to create an augmented reality visualization prototype that will improve the efficacy and safety of robot-assisted prostate surgery.

Kitware will develop a human/machine collaborative system (HMCS) that provides surgeons with an augmented reality (AR) view that fuses a pre-operative MRI model of the prostate, tumor and surrounding tissues with the da Vinci system laparoscopic video, while compensating for non-rigid prostate tissue deformation using intra-operative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging. Adding an AR system with intra-operatively updated anatomical models to the robotic system will allow the surgeon to perceive the multimoda

Students' VTK Google Summer of Code Projects Completed

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Visualization Toolkit participated for the first time this year in the Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization. This program is an exciting way for students to get involved in open source while being funded by Google to “flip bits not burgers.” Marcus Hanwell, a former Google Summer of Code student participant, acted as the VTK organization’s administrator and mentor, with Jeff Baumes as the backup administrator and mentor.

VTK was given two student slots as a new mentoring organization, which made it especially difficult to select from all of the high-quality proposals received. After a great deal of deliberation, David Lonie’s proposal entitled “Chemistry Visualization” and Tharindu De Silva’s proposal entitled “Implement Select Algorithms from IEEE VisWeek 2010 in VTK” were selected. We were pleased to see both of the students engaging the developer community and using the to

Kitware Expands Offices and Workforce

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware recently expanded its offices in Clifton Park, N.Y. and Carrboro, N.C., a direct result of the company’s sustained growth rate of 30% per year, and an expanding internship program. The company has successfully grown to more than 100 employees, with 2011 revenue expected to top $20M. The expansion adds 10,000 square feet in New York and 2,000 in North Carolina, making room for the new hires expected by year end and the next round of interns in 2012.

“I attribute this growth to the talented staff at Kitware. We strive to find the best and most gifted employees who will help us grow, while maintaining the corporate culture that we feel has led to this success,” said Will Schroeder.

In addition to expanding their corporate headquarters and Carrboro, N.C. offices, Kitware is also in the process of obtaining new office space for their recently opened Kitware SAS office in Lyon, F

Kitware Welcomes New Team Members in September

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

In September, Kitware welcomed four new team members and a year-long intern. Megha Pandey and Eric Smith joined the computer vision team, Sankhesh Jhaveri joined the scientific computing team, and Brenda McCormack joined the contracting team. Michael Jeulin-LaGarrigue will be with Kitware for a year while interning with the medical team.

Megha Pandey joined the computer vision group in the Clifton Park office. She holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a dual B.Tech and M.Tech in electrical engineering and communication and signal processing from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Bombay. Ms. Pandey has research experience from UNC and IIT, Bombay, where she worked on a number of notable projects including indoor scene classification, vision-based marker-less motion capture, moving object segmentation, and an RFID system with

ITKv4 Beta Now Available

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware and the ITK team are pleased to announce the release of ITKv4 Beta. This release includes number of changes resulting from the massive effort for revising, simplifying, and accelerating ITK. While some of the features in the Beta release are still works in progress, they are mature enough for developers to begin using them and provide early feedback on the design and implementation of the code.

Some highlights of this Beta release include an updated license, modularization, new level sets and registration frameworks, improved support for file formats and improved C++ code. The ITK license has been changed to Apache 2.0, which is a more modern, precise and professional license than BSD. Like the BSD license, the Apache 2.0 license still empowers the community to make full use of the toolkit without significant restrictions.

Kitware is pleased to announce that Amazon is now carrying a selection of Kitware titles in both France and Germany. These titles are also still available through Amazon in the USA and in the UK, and directly through the Kitware web site. This allows international customers the ability to significantly reduce their shipping costs by selecting the Amazon site closest to them. Bulk orders of 10 or more books should still be ordered directly from Kitware to receive the best discount.

Currently, three titles are available through amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr, and amazon.de including the VTK User's Guide, the VTK Textbook, and Mastering CMake. The ParaView Guide is cur

CMake 2.8.6 Now Available

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of CMake 2.8.6. This release features several notable changes, including a new AUTOMOC target property that helps make it easier to build Qt projects and support for the Intel Fortran compiler in VisualStudio10. Additionally, VisualStudio 9 and 10 generators for Itanium platform have been added, and appear as the “Visual Studio 9 2008 IA64” and “Visual Studio 10 IA64” generators on Windows builds of CMake.

This release also contains an experimental generator in the Windows build targeting VisualStudio 11. It will remain "Experimental" until VisualStudio 11 itself is finalized. If you have the developer preview of VisualStudio 11, we would appreciate any feedback you have. Please keep in mind that this is very new, and has only been tested enough to be useful to include for the community to test driv

Kitware Team Grows in September

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed Jason Li to the team in September. Jason joined the medical imaging team as an R&D engineer at the Clifton Park office. He earned his Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky at Lexington, and his Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Beijing JiaoTong University in China. Jason comes to Kitware from Bloomberg L.P. in New York City where he was a C++/C Senior Software Engineer. As part of the infrastructure team, he was responsible for the design and implementation of several internal communication products and analytics tools.

Kitware is excited to welcome Jason to the team! Kitware is still seeking talented and motivated individuals for a variety of positions in computer vision, scientific visualization, medical imaging, and informatics. For more information on our current openings, please visit our website. Interested applicants should send a cover letter and resume to jobs@kitware.com for

Kitware Sponsors MICCAI Society Young Scientist Publication Impact Award

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware commends Dr. Boon Thye Thomas Yeo, who has won the Young Scientist Publication Impact Award from the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society. Sponsored by Kitware, this award rewards scientists who are early in their careers and are shaping the medical image analysis field.

The award recipient was announced by Dr. William Wells, Harvard Professor and MICCAI Board Member, and Dr. Stephen Aylward on Wednesday evening during the annual MICCAI conference’s award ceremony. Dr. Yeo will receive a $1,000 prize for his paper, “Effects of Registration Regularization and Atlas Sharpness on Segmentation Accuracy” from MICCAI 2007. Honorable mentions go out to the runners up, Dr. Kang Li for his paper, “Cell Population Tracking and Lineage Construction with Spatiotemporal Context” from MICCAI 2007 and Dr. Paul M. Novotny for his paper “GPU Based Real-time Instrument Tracking with Three Dimensional Ultrasound&rdquo

Free Online Courses Now Available

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the availability of free online courses in support of its open-source communities. The courses, designed to give new and beginning users the skills and knowledge required to effectively use these open-source tools, will provide an introduction to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), CMake, ParaView, and the Insight Toolkit (ITK). Each 90-minute course will cover one toolkit and be taught by an expert Kitware instructor.

Introduction to VTK
This course provides an overview of the Visualization Toolkit suitable for new users. It covers the various data types supported by VTK, the pipeline architecture used for processing data, and the rendering framework used to display results. Attendees gain hands on experience through several programming examples presented to highlight key concepts. Examples cover the execution pipeli

VTK 5.8.0 Released

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware and the VTK team are pleased to announce the release of VTK 5.8.0, a major release containing several noteworthy additions and enhancements.

There are numerous improvements to the Python wrappers including the addition of many classes, methods, and constants that were not previously wrapped, along with support for unicode strings arguments, two-dimensional array arguments, pass-by-reference, and default argument values. As part of the wrapper improvement effort, the code for the wrappers has been reorganized and structured to make it easier to expand and maintain.

VTK charts have been updated to make use of the 2D scene with new text rendering and improved OpenGL rendering routines. New chart types such as pie charts and 2D histograms have been added. There are also improvements to the scatter and parallel

Kitware Awarded $300,000 in NIH Research Grants to Fund Advancements in Biomedical Research

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has been awarded two $150,000 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop advanced software systems for enhancing digital pathology and remote-access microscopy, continuing Kitware’s longstanding track record of applying open-source systems to solving timely biomedical research challenges.

“Kitware is focused on providing open-source tools for managing tera-scale histology, and creating long-term solutions to current scientific and medical challenges,” said Charles Law, Principal Investigator on these projects. “Whether we’re building new educational tools or research platforms, our software systems will play a critical role in improving future patient care.”

In Phase I of the SBIR grant, "An Open Source Digital Pathology System Supporting Multi-Touch Interaction," Kitware will develop a freely-available, multi-platform, open-source system for processing slide image data for integration of dig

Kitware Announces the Release of KiwiViewer 0.0.2

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of KiwiViewer 0.0.2. This latest version of the free, interactive mobile application for the exploration of geometric datasets is now available for download at the Apple app store.

Most notable about this release is the new support for iPhone devices, in addition to the iPad. Other features include su

Kitware Awarded DOE Funding to Develop Climate Change Analysis Tool

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Kitware SBIR funding to develop an analysis tool with easy, simplified access to computer model outputs resulting from long-term climate change projections performed by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

The application, ClimatePipes, will facilitate access to data for non-researchers, as opposed to a more technical audience. Kitware believes that effective analysis in climate science relies on having the appropriate cyberinfrastructure to enable people to discover, access, manipulate, and visualize large and complex datasets of interest. Facilitating widespread accessibility of this data can have a significant impact on commercial, educational, and government activities.

In Phase I of this project, Kitware will create a prototype application that demonstrates simple data access and manipulation, and basic analysis, visualization, and data provenance.

"ClimatePipes will provide access to data that can have a real impact

Kitware Continues to Grow in August

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed four new employees to the team in August. Yiliang Xu started with the computer vision team, Yuzheng Zhou joined the MIDAS team, Chris Hyatt joined the systems administration team, and Ann Murtha joined the human resources team.

Yiliang Xu joined as an R&D engineer on the computer vision team at the Clifton Park office. He received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, earned his first Ph.D. in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and his second Ph.D. in computer science from Texas A&M University. As a Ph.D. research assistant, Dr. Xu worked with systems and algorithms for automated collaborative observation using networked robotic cameras. He also designed and implemented a flying bird tracking and species recognition system using active sensing, and an online panoramic

Kitware Ranks #1572 on the 2011 Inc. 5000 List

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Inc. magazine announced this week its fifth annual Inc. 500|5000 list, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. Kitware ranked #1572 overall, with three-year revenue growth of 175%, and #118 within its industry. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent entrepreneurs. Online retailer ideeli tops this year’s list. Kitware joins Spirit Airlines, television maker Vizio, Honest Tea, Dunkin Donuts and Metrokane, makers of the Rabbit corkscrew, among other prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

This is the fourth consecutive year that Kitware has made the Inc.500|5000 list, predominantly attributed to its talented workforce and the success of its open-source business model. Kitware provides a

KiwiViewer Released in Apple App Store

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of KiwiViewer, a free, interactive application for the exploration of geometric datasets in the Apple App Store. Supported by Kitware and the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC), this new mobile application enables users to access 3D datasets from email attachments or through Dropbox and easily pan, zoom, and rotate with intuitive multi-touch gestures on an iPad.

KiwiViewer is built on top of Kitware’s new VES toolkit to support OpenGL ES rendering and multi-touch interaction, as well as portions of VTK for data loading and filtering. The new application can load STL, OBJ and VTK surface geometry files. Both VES and the KiwiViewer application will be release

Kitware Team Grows in July

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed five new employees and one intern in July. Matthew Dawkins, Paul Tunison, and Nick Sullivan joined the computer vision group. Chris Harris joined the scientific visualization team, and Matthew McCormick joined the medical team. Benjamin Long is an intern who will be working on MIDAS for the next year.

Matthew Dawkins joined the computer vision team as an R&D engineer at the Clifton Park office. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He has previous experience as an intern for Digital Receiver Technology, a Boeing subsidiary, where he assisted in the development of embedded software applications for the protocol engineering department.

Paul Tunison started with Kitware in November 2010 as a computer vision

MIDASDesktop 1.8.2 Released

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of MIDASDesktop 1.8.2. MIDAS Desktop is a client-side GUI application for synchronizing data and metadata between a user's local filesystem and a MIDAS server. It also manages, searches, and organizes datasets in both the client and server datastores.

A major update included in this release is that MIDASDesktop and MIDAScli are now built as application wrapping libraries that are part of the Common Toolkit (CTK). By porting much of the bulk of MIDASDesktop’s functionality into CTK, older library dependencies were replaced with better functionality such as that which exists within Qt. These changes will allow users to pause and resume file uploads and downloads, and also push selected subtrees of their data using drag and drop. The default directory has also

VolView 3.4 Released

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VolView 3.4, featuring several notable enhancements and marking the first open source release of this project. VolView is Kitware’s intuitive, interactive system for volume visualization that allows researchers to quickly explore and analyze complex 3D medical or scientific data on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. VolView is a great example of an end-user application built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and has been in development since 1999.

The VolView 3.4 release contains several new features. Paintbrush widgets have been added to allow users to perform manual data segmentation in 2D and 3D. There are also new segmenta

Kitware Continues to Grow in June

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed three new full-time employees and five interns throughout the month of June. Ilknur Kabul and Joe Snyder joined the medical team, Kyle Lutz joined the scientific visualization team, and five additional interns have joined Kitware for the summer.

Ilknur Kabul joined Kitware as a member of the medical team at the Carrboro office. She is completing her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and holds a master’s degree from Bilkent University, and a bachelor’s degree from Middle East Technical University. Prior to joining Kitware, Ilknur worked as a research assistant for Medical Image Display and Analysis Group (MIDAG), where she researched illustrative rendering techniques for medical imaging and developed model-based texture synthesis approaches for generating anatomical surface and volumetric textures.

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of CMake 2.8.5. Particularly notable about this release is the number of individuals around the world who contributed code; 33 individuals added changes that have been incorporated into the CMake 2.8.5 release. By using a git workflow we are able to preserve the author in commit objects, even if pushed or applied by another contributor, enabling us to measure the number of contributors.

Additionally, there are new features in the release, such as the ProcessorCount module that provides a CMake language-based way to retrieve the number of processors usable for parallel building or testing. The CheckPrototypeDefinition module allows users to check if an exact function signature definition is available.

For the full list of changes and updates, the change log is available here and the release

Kitware Supports the VA's Open Source EHR

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce that it will be providing open-source expertise to the Informatics Applications Group (tiag) in support of the Department of Veteran Affair’s initiative to create a Custodial Agent for an Open Source Electronic Health Record. Visit osehrca.org for more information and to provide feedback.

Kitware Authors Contribute to Architecture of Open Source Text

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Earlier this month, “The Architecture of Open Source Applications” was published. Edited by Amy Brown and Greg Wilson, the book highlights 25 open-source applications, with the guest authors contributing the chapters. Each chapter covers a different open-source application and discusses the structure and reasoning behind them. Two chapters were written by Kitware team members; Berk Geveci and Will Schroeder contributed a chapter on VTK and Bill Hoffman and Ken Martin contributed a chapter on CMake.

The book is being sold on Lulu and Amazon, and all proceeds are being donated to Amnesty International. Also released under a Creative Commons License, the book can be read online for free. Since its release, the book has sold more than 375 hard copies and 240 PDF copies.

For more information regarding the book, visit the website:

Kitware welcomed three new employees and eleven interns throughout April and May. Tami Grasso is part of the office administration team, Katie Sharkey is the newest member of the communications team, and Lai-Yee Burnham joins the finance team.

Tami Grasso joined Kitware as an office assistant for the Clifton Park office in April. Prior to joining Kitware, Tami worked in various administrative positions, including as a co-owner of Capitaland Flooring Company. There she was responsible for maintaining company records, providing customer support, and developing and distributing marketing materials. Tami also has experience through volunteer work organizing events and activities. Her range of experience and excellent organization skills are an asset to the company and help keep everything running smoothly.

Kitware has been selected by Inc. magazine as one of Winning Workplaces’ 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces competition. The annual contest recognizes the nation’s 50 best small and mid-sized company work environments in Inc.’s June issue.

Since 2003, Winning Workplaces, an Evanston, Ill.-based nonprofit organization, has recognized firms that attribute much of their business success to their commitment to exemplary people practices and outstanding workplace cultures. This year, Winning Workplaces received nearly 350 completed applications for the contest. A national panel of experts in leadership and small to mid-sized business judged the finalists based on specific metrics and qualitative assessments of the finalists’ success in creating workplace that engage employees and deliver bottom-line results.

In addition to creating cutting-edge toolkits and developing adva
Google Summer of Code Student Projects Announced

Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Earlier this year VTK was selected as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization. This program encourages student participation in open source communities through three-month paid development projects. There are two student projects for VTK, one on chemistry visualization and one on algorithms from IEEE VisWeek.

Marcus Hanwell will mentor David Lonie, who will focus on creating a native implementation of tools to visualize molecular systems and electronic structure in VTK. He will also work on developing additional functionality such as plotting molecular orbital diagrams, visualizing spectroscopic tensors, animating geometry optimizations and rendering periodic crystal structures.

Jeff Baumes will mentor Tharindu De Silva, who will work on implementing and integrating three of the leading algorithms published in VisWeek 2
Kitware Announces ITK Course in Lyon, France

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce a course covering the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) scheduled for June 7, 2011 in Lyon, France. This course will be an overview of ITK introducing new users to the toolkit. By the end of the course, attendees will understand ITK's basic functions, understand how to create an application with ITK, and be able to create and run registration and segmentation filters.

The instructor, Julien Jomier, will cover:
- overview of ITK architecture
- execution pipelines
- streaming and data parallelism
- basic filtering and segmentation
- Registration pipeline
- interfacing ITK with external applications
- building ITK applications with a user interface
- using ITK from various interpreted languages
The course will be a hands-on experience, with attendees down
Kitware Projects and People Recognized for Work with Qt

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Over the past five years Kitware has been transitioning to Qt for the development of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). Qt provides a powerful, open-source, cross-platform GUI toolkit that is developed through a strong community effort, and is widely adopted by software developers. By using Qt, developers are able to easily create GUIs that are familiar and intiutive to users, a key component when working with complex software.

Kitware transitioned ParaView to Qt in 2007 with the release of ParaView 3. In 2008, the Qt-based GUI front end to CMake was released. Kitware is also playing a key role in the transition of 3D Slicer to Qt with the forthcoming release of Slicer 4.

In recognition of the work in Qt, Kitware is pleased to announce that Marcus Hanwell and Rob Maynard have been named Qt ambassadors. This worldwi
Visualization Toolkit Selected for Google Summer of Code

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has been accepted for the 2011 Google Summer of Code, with Kitware acting as the mentoring organization. This program encourages student participation in open source communities through three-month paid development projects. Students interested in the program apply to work on a specific project and work with a mentor at the organization over the course of the summer. This global program gives students the opportunity to work on real-world software projects and provides mentoring organizations with potential new developers. Additionally, since all the development is all open source, the projects grow and code is contributed back to the community.

Of 417 applications this year, Google selected 175 open source projects for participation, 50 of which are new to the program. There is an

Kitware Adds Three Members to the Team in February

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomed three new employees to the Clifton Park office in the month of February. John Tourtellott joins the computer vision team, Zak Ford is part of the systems administration team, and Michelle Kimmel is on the finance team.

John Tourtellott is an R&D engineer with the computer vision team, and has been developing software to evaluate the results of activity-detection algorithms and systems. This software will initially be used by participants in an activity recognition competition that Kitware is holding among several university teams. Prior to joining Kitware, John worked at Simmetrix as a senior software engineer, where his accomplishments include developing new software for effective filtering of quantization artifacts from voxel-based datasets and new point-locator software for efficiently detecting matched model ve

NASA Awards Kitware Contract to Develop ParaView for Ultrascale Visualization

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Phase I effort focused on resolving bottlenecks in ultrascale visualization to support interactive exploration of massive datasets

NASA has awarded Kitware SBIR funding to develop an advanced visualization software solution to address the challenge of analyzing and obtaining insight from massive datasets. While the scientists producing these large datasets are accustomed to running batch jobs to perform visualization, scientific discovery is greatly enhanced by interactive exploration of the data. The software will address critical issues in ultrascale visualization in order to enable real-time investigation of these extremely large datasets using massi

ParaView 3.10.0 Now Available

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

The ParaView team is pleased to announce the availability of the ParaView 3.10.0 final binaries for download on the ParaView download page. The ParaView 3.10.0 release features several notable new features and improvements, described below. For an exhaustive list of the new features and bug-fixes, please refer to the change log at: http://www.paraview.org/Bug/changelog_page.php.

Kitware is pleased to announce a course covering the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) scheduled for April 7-8, 2011 in Lyon, France. This advanced course will cover using pipelines in VTK; viewing 2D images, meshes and stacks of images; writing VTK filters; understanding how VTK performs rendering and visualizing information in VTK. The course will be a hands-on experience, with attendees downloading the software tools in advance to use during the course exercises. By working in a familiar development environment (Windows, Linux, or Mac), attendees will be able to better focus on the course content, and will retain the course exercises for future reference.

The early registration deadline for this course is March 17, 2011. Registration for the full two day course received on or before March 17, 2011 is only 1000€. Full details on the

Kitware Receives Tibbetts Award for STTR Program Excellence

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware was honored with a Tibbetts Award for its Software Toolkit for Image-Guided Surgery (IGSTK) Phase I and II STTRS. The award, which recognizes companies who represent excellence in achieving the mission and goals of SBIR and STTR programs, is named for Roland Tibbetts. Tibbetts is considered the father of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which he began as an experimental project at the National Science Foundation in the early 1980's.

IGSTK, Kitware's cutting-edge tool for research involving minimally invasive image-guided medical procedures, is being used in investigations into new surgical techniques that may improve surgical accuracy and precision, increase a surgeon’s ability to confidently treat challenging and complex pathologies, decrease surgical trauma, and reduce recovery time for patients.

CMake 2.8.4 Released

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of CMake 2.8.4. This release incorporates a number of improvements and new features. There is better support for Windows resources, such as Visual Studio 10 and windres, with many improvements in the VS10 generator. Generator expressions are now supported, and CMake on Cygwin no longer predefines WIN32, but builds UNIX-style material without necessitating modifications.

CMake now also has new warnings that help detect command line variable misspellings and unused CMake variables, controlled by the following command line options to CMake:

  --warn-uninitialized = Warn about uninitialized values.

  --warn-unused-vars = Warn about unused variables.

Kitware Continues to Grow

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In January, Kitware hired George Zagaris as an R&D engineer for the Scientific Computing group. He is working on the development of advanced algorithms and software infrastructure within ParaView and VTK to efficiently and robustly process and visualize large-scale distributed Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) datasets.

Prior to joining Kitware, George was working as a research programmer and developed an advanced toolkit for parallel overset grid assembly targeting unsteady, time-dependent, moving body aerodynamic simulations. He earn

IGSTK 4.4 Released

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

On behalf of the Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) team, Kitware is pleased to announce the release of IGSTK 4.4. IGSTK is a high-level, component-based framework that provides a common functionality for image-guided surgery applications. The framework is a set of high-level components integrated with low-level open source software libraries and application programming interfaces (API) from hardware vendors.

The new features in the 4.4 release include support for Ascension's 3D Guidance trackers (medSAFE, driveBAY and trakSTAR); PET image readers, spatial object and representation classes; and PET/CT fused image and electromagnetic tracker-guided needle biopsy application examples.

The build instructions can be found on the Kitware public wiki an

ActiViz released as free and open-source software

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has announced that ActiViz, a commercial .NET wrapper for VTK, will now be available free and open source under a BSD license.

The unique ActiViz tool is used for generating C# wrappers around Kitware's Visualization Toolkit (VTK). VTK, which has been under development for more than 15 years, is an object-oriented C++ toolkit for advanced visualization and data processing used by thousands of researchers and software developers world-wide.

ActiViz enables developers to combine the power of VTK with the many .NET framework objects for web and database access in order to quickly develop production-ready, interactive 3D applications in the .NET environment. Available as source code or as a pre-built WinForms Control, ActiViz .NET includes examples and

Kitware Honors Employees

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

On Sunday during the annual Holiday Party for its Clifton Park, NY office, Kitware honored two employees for their dedication to the company over a ten year period.

Brad King joined Kitware in June 2000 as a summer intern while pursuing his B.S. at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Brad continued working at Kitware while completing his undergraduate and graduate education, receiving his Ph.D. in December 2008. Dr. King is an invaluable member of the Kitware software development team, and is a lead contributor to CMake, Kitware's most popular open-source project. Brad is also a major contributor to VTK's advanced pipeline architecture and the ITK wrappin

Kitware Announces Open Source Course in Lyon, France

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce a course covering its open source tools scheduled for February 2-4, 2011 in Lyon, France. This course will cover the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), CMake, and ParaView, and is suitable for software developers who would like to learn more about these tools and for project managers intending to integrate these software tools into their team's development process. The course will be a hands-on experience, with attendees downloading the software tools in advance to use during the course exercises. By working in a familiar development environment (Windows, Linux, or Mac), attendees will be able to better focus on the course content, and will retain the course exercises for future reference.

The early registration deadline

CDash 1.8.2 Released

Mon, 13 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is proud to announce the release of CDash 1.8.2. CDash is the open-source, web-based software testing server that aggregates, analyzes and displays the results of software testing processes submitted from clients around the world, conveying the state of a software system and allowing continuous improvements in its quality.

The main CDash server for open-source projects is now hosting 16+ projects and my.cdash.org is hosting more than 250 projects including KDE, Amarok and Lapack dashboards.

The 1.8 release fixes more than 20 bugs and adds new features including:

Support for asynchronous submissions

Sup

Kitware's Most Popular Books Available on amazon.co.uk

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Two of Kitware's most popular technical books, Mastering CMake (ISBN-13: 978-1-930934-22-1) and The VTK User's Guide (ISBN-13: 978-1-930934-23-8) are now available through amazon.co.uk.

"This is great news for our European customers who can now obtain our books with the less expensive and more flexible shipping options that can be offered only by a large retail service such as Amazon," said Lisa Avila, Vice President

Kitware's Cutting-Edge Research Leads To Record Growth and More Jobs

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware announced one of its largest growth periods in the company’s history. Revenue growth from $5.6M in 2005 to a projected $15M in 2010, buoyed by newly awarded research grants and contracts, has extended the company’s immediate hiring needs in both the New York and North Carolina offices. Kitware is expecting to add more than 30 percent to its workforce before the end of 2011.

Kitware’s technology portfolio includes 3D visualization and informatics, scientific databases, quality software process, medical imaging and computer vision. In addition to military groups like Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Kitware often partners with premier organizations such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. National Labs, Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Kitware is also hire

Kitware Offers Free Access to VolView

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has announced that VolView, a commercial product for exploring and analyzing complex 3D medical or scientific data, will now be available free of charge to researchers around the world.

First developed in 1999 as an intuitive, interactive system for volume visualization, VolView allows users to load and interactively explore datasets using both 2D and 3D display methods. To view a short demonstration, please click here.

Compatible with Windows, Mac or Linux, VolView is capable of volume rendering, maximum intensity projections and oblique reformatting. In addition, VolView can load multiple datasets simultaneously, support creating and applying 2D a

Kitware, Leading US Builder of Open Source Technology and Developer of Advanced Research Solutions, Unveils Plans for the RSNA 2010 Conference

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

At RSNA 2010, Kitware will highlight a number of applications and technologies designed to deliver advanced medical imaging solutions based on free and open source software for scientists and engineers. In addition, Kitware will make an announcement in regards to VolView, a biomedical imaging research application that the company says will have a definitive impact on researchers worldwide.

Kitware, Inc. a software services company that builds open-source platforms and develops advanced research solutions, will attend and exhibit at the International RSNA 2010 conference, to take place at the McCormick Place in Chicago from November 28-December 3, 2010. At the conference, Kitware will highlight a number of applications and technologies designed to deliver advanced medical imaging solutions based on free and open source software for scientists and engineers. In addition, Kitware will make an announcement in regards to VolView, a biomedical imaging research applic

Kitware Receives Honors in 2010 HPCwire Readers� and Editors� Choice Awards

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Annual HPCwire Awards Demonstrate Achievement of Mindshare from Within the Global HPC Community

Kitware, Inc. has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2010 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC10) in New Orleans. The list of winners was revealed at the HPCwire booth at the event, and on the HPCwire website. Kitware was recognized with the following honors:

−    Editors' Choice Award for Best HPC Visualization Product or Technology (for ParaView);
−    Readers' Choice Award for Best HPC Visualization Product of Technology (for ParaView).

Kitware & the NA-MIC Community Announce Alpha Release of 3D Slicer 4.0

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

3D Slicer 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 has been closely involved in many of these innovations. In particular, 3D Slicer builds upon ITK, VTK, CMake, CDash, CTK and MIDAS.

Slicer is funded by grants associated with the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) and the Neuroimaging Analysis Center (NAC) and has an extensive community behind it. The lead institute for these multi-institutional centers is Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH). Other funded participants include the University of Utah, GE Corporate Research, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins, MIND Institute, MIT, MGH, UCLA, and many others.

To date, 3D Slicer contai

ITKv4

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Ten years ago, the National Library of Medicine initiated a software development program to produce an open-source toolkit for the segmentation and registration of medical images, in particular the Visible Man and Visible Woman data. The outcome of that program was the Insight Toolkit (ITK). From those humble beginnings, ITK is now used in basic and applied research, commercial medical image processing and surgical guidance systems around the world.

It is estimated that ITK is contributing to projects in over 45 countries and in nearly every major academic and industry research lab involved in medical image analysis. Applications areas include radiology, neurology, pathology, oncology, neurosurgery and even satellite imagery. Data being processed by ITK includes nearly every medical imaging modality such as electron microscopy, MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound, video and OCT.

This year, ITK will be going through a major refactoring process to ensure its vitality for the next ten years. The main goa

Kitware Announces Opening of European Office

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lyon office allows the Company to continue its expansion
into European markets and better service its current
European customers and collaborators

CLIFTON PARK, NY – October 25, 2010 – Kitware, a software services company that builds open-source platforms and develops advanced research solutions, today announced the opening of its European Office Kitware SAS. Located in Lyon, France, the office will be headed by Julien Jomier, a current Kitware U.S. employee with expertise in software process, medical ima

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Lynn Bardsley
Lynn joined Kitware as a Program Manager for the Computer Vision Group in July. She received her M.S. in Computer Science from Union College.

Dhanannjay Deo
Dr. Deo joined Kitware as a member of the Scientific Visualization Group in August. He received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pune, his M.S. from the Indian Institute of Science and his Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Xiaoxiao Liu
Xiaoxiao joined Kitware as a member of the Medical Imaging Group in September. She received a B.E. in Computer Science and an M.E. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kitware Tapped by National Alliance for Medical Image Computing to Continue Development of its Advanced Biomedical Imaging Toolkit

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, developers of open source and advanced research solutions, today announced the renewal of a contract with the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC) to continue with its development of the NA-MIC Kit, a high-quality software for solving medical image analysis and visualization challenges in bio-medical research. In addition, Kitware has been charged by NA-MIC with assisting in traumatic brain injury research through the analysis of MRI longitudinal studies.

One of seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC), NA-MIC's focus is to convert scientific advances within biomedical imaging into open-source resources to develop advanced software tools. In 2004, Kitware was contracted by NA-MIC to develop the original Kit, a scalable, free open-source software system used by clinicians and biomedical researchers to mine large quantities of imaging data and use advanced computational tools such as longitudinal and statistical analysis to identify unique patient data and rel

DARPA Awards Kitware $11 Million for Phase II of VIRAT Program

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Advanced research company will develop the next generation event-based query and alerting system for video surveillance

CLIFTON PARK, NY - October 4, 2010 - Kitware, a company that develops open source software and advanced research solutions, has received an $11 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to lead Phase II of its Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program. Kitware was selected to lead the sole Phase II award based on the success of their Phase I effort.

In Phase II of VIRAT, Kitware will lead the development of the second-generation VIRAT system, a revolutionary video analysis capability that filters and prioritizes massive amounts of archived and streaming video based on events; presents the high-value intelligence content clearly and intuitively to video analysts; and results in substantial reductions in analyst workload while increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.

Th

Kitware Ranks No. 1655 on the 2010 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 172%

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Inc. magazine today ranked Kitware NO. 1655 on its fourth annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy—America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs. Music website Pandora, convenience store chain 7-Eleven, Brooklyn Brewery, and Radio Flyer, maker of the iconic children’s red wagon, are among the prominent brands featured on this year’s list.

“The leaders of the companies on this year’s Inc. 5000 have figured out how to grow their businesses during the longest recession since the Great Depression,” said Inc. president Bob LaPointe. “The 2010 Inc. 5000 showcases a particularly hardy group of entrepreneurs.”

Kitware, Inc. is a leader in the creation and support of open- source software

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees, Looking to Hire More

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team:

Jacob Becker

Jacob joined Kitware's Computer Vision Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Jacob received his B.S. in Computer Science and Archaeology from the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse (UW-L) in 2001 and his M.S. in Computer Science from RPI in 2009. While at RPI he researched aligning a 2D image to a 3D model and filling in holes in LiDAR data using evidence provided by a single aligned 2D image.

Aasish Chaudhary

Aashish joined Kitware's Scientific Computing Group in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer. Aashish received his B.S. (Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Devhi Ahilya University (India) in 2000 and his M.S. in Industrial Engineering with minor in Computer Science from Iowa State University. His thesis work involved researching, design

Kitware Organizing MICCAI Workshop on Systems and Architectures for Computer Assisted Interventions

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is co-organizing a workshop on Systems and Architectures for Computer Assisted Interventions at MICCAI 2010. The goal of this workshop is to establish a forum for discussing open interfaces, architectures, interoperability, and standards for the development of computer assisted intervention systems.

Modularization of surgical assist systems has become a topic of growing importance due to the increasing complexity of system components. Future systems will have to depend on reliable components and frameworks, which are used as building blocks to realize the desired functionality. To achieve modularization, standards will be key, as they allow for cross-vendor interoperability. As such, this workshop will focus primarily on modularization and standardization of CAS systems and frameworks and will include strong participation

Stephen Aylward to speak at the "From MICCAI Algorithms to Clinical Translational Tools: The NA-MIC Platform" Tutorial

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

MICCAI offers a window into the latest scientific achievements in medical image computing and computer assisted interventions which will lead to the next generation of technological breakthroughs for improved clinical care. A critical step to maximize the long-term positive impact of MICCAI cutting-edge algorithms is to enable their deployment, validation and concrete use by the clinical research community for whom they were developed.

For the past six years, the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NA-MIC), one of the seven National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBC), part of the NIH Roadmap for medical research, has focused its efforts on the conversion of scientific advances from the biomedical imaging community into open-source resources for users and developers, in order to improve the availability and deployment of advanced software tools on a national and international scale.

The objective of the tutorial is to introduce the challen

Kitware Awarded NIH Grant to Improve Lesion Biopsy Using PET-CT Imaging

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has received a one-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) totaling $228,458 to improve the clinical effectiveness of liver lesion biopsy using PET-CT imaging. The project will extend the open source Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) to enable the fusion of motion corrected PET images with CT images for liver lesion biopsy.

The main focus of the project will be the development of a robust respiratory motion correction technique aimed at producing more effective PET-CT guided biopsies. Kitware and its team of researchers will develop a respiratory motion correction algorithm to help develop a better technique, which decreases errors in imaging caused by artifacts like organ sliding which can occur just from the natural respiration process.

''While PET imaging can localize malignancies in tumors that do not have a CT correlate, the diagnostic benefit is often gravely affected by basic respiratory motion,'' said Dr. Andinet Enquobahrie, tech

Kitware Receives $1.07 Million in Stimulus Funds to Further Innovation in the Renowned Insight Toolkit (ITK)

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware today announced it has received a $1.07 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to improve the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). A dynamic, self-sustaining, cross-platform, and open source application development framework, ITK is used freely in a multitude of commercial and non-commercial image segmentation and registration programs. Kitware's proposal will go towards lowering the learning curve for researchers and developers, and incorporating innovative high-performance computing technologies, while maintaining the toolkit's versatility and industry-leading capabilities.

Created with funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, with program management provided by the National Library of Medicine, ITK is an established foundation for medical imaging research and the distribution of advanced imaging solutions. Kitware, one of the original ITK development teamss 10 years ago, is now one of the six institutes charged with revising ITK'

DARPA Awards Kitware a $13.8 Million Contract for Online Threat Detection and Forensic Analysis in Wide-Area Motion Imagery

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has received a $13,883,314 contract from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a software system capable of automatically and interactively discovering actionable intelligence from wide area motion imagery (WAMI) of complex urban, suburban, and rural environments.

The primary information elements in WAMI data are moving entities in the context of roads, buildings, and other scene features. These entities, while exploitable, often yield fragmented tracks in complex urban environments due to occlusions, stops, and other factors. Kitware's software system will use algorithmic solutions to associate tracks and then identify and integrate local events to detect potential threats and perform forensic analysis.

The developed algorithms will form the basis of a software prototype called the Persistent Stare Exploitation and Analysis System (PerSEAS) that will significantly augment an end-user's ability to discover novel intelligence using models of activities, normalc

Kitware Sponsors Tutorial Contest at Summer 2010 NA-MIC Project Week

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, sponsors of the Tutorial Contest at the 11th NA-MIC PROJECT WEEK, would like to congratulation the winners of the Winter 2010 NA-MIC Tutorial Contest!

1st Prize for End User Tutorial: $400
Robot-assisted MRI-guided prostate biopsy
Andras Lasso, Junichi Tokuda, Nobuhiko Hata, Gabor Fichtinger, Queen's University

Special Prize for Core features Tutorial: $200
Fiducials
Nicole Aucoin, Surgical Planning Lab, Brigham & Women's Hospital

Special Prize for Education in medical image processing: $200
Atlas Label Fusion & Surface Registration
Dominik Meier, Brigham and Women's Hospital

Special Prize for Upgrade to existing tutorial: $200
End to End Meshing Workflow
Nicole Grosland, Vince Magnotta with Steve Pieper, Curtis Lisle, University of Iowa

See Groundbreaking study finds a strong association between airway bifurcation CT densities, loss of lung function and lung cancer risk

CLIFTON PARK, NY - June 28, 2010 - Kitware announces today the first published report of a new and quantitative method for measuring lung cancer risk within the July issue of Academic Radiology. The paper provides a multi-disciplinary scientific literature rationale and preliminary study data showing that increased calcification at upper airway bifurcations, when combined with pulmonary function test scores, can be used to estimate an individual's risk of developing lung cancer.

The new approach, described within the paper "A Quantitative Method for Estimating Individual Lung Cancer Risk," utilizes a low dose Computed Tomography (CT) scan and a pulmonary function test to measure lung damage and cancer risk. The use of two commonly available clinical tests allows the new approach to be independently studied at most healthcare

Kitware and Lung Cancer Alliance Announce the First Publicly Available Lung Cancer Database Created Through Patient Data Donations

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Patients participated in the Give A Scan pilot program to collect and contribute their CT image datasets and patient history records to an open image archive; the data is now freely downloadable to help research efforts geared toward understanding, detecting and treating lung cancer

CLIFTON PARK, NY - June 8, 2010 - Kitware and Lung Cancer Alliance announce the release of the first group of lung cancer patient records now publicly available for download at GiveAScan.org.

This open image archive represents the successful completion of a pilot project to determine the feasibility of a patient donated database to accelerate medical research. This initial nine patient database includes over 1 GB of radiological imaging studies including Computed Tomography (CT) scans, volunteered by patients to accelerate lung cancer research including screening, computer

Activity Recognition Conference

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, in conjunction with DARPA, is organizing the International Workshop on Frontiers of Activity Recognition as part of the DARPA VIRAT program. For more information please visit the conference website.

Kitware Awarded A $369,588 Contract from The Army Corps of Engineers To Extend Study in Hydrodynamic Simulation

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Proposed research to extend computational model building in the area of Coastal Modeling System Development (MORPHOS)

Kitware has received a contract for $369, 588 from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' research organization, the Engineer Research and Development Center, to focus on extending the functionality of the Computational Model Builder (CMB) environment specifically in the area of simulation models for coastal systems with an emphasis on Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.

The CMB environment consists of a suite of applications that provide the capability to define models suitable for hydrodynamic simulati

An Update on VTK's Git Conversion

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We're pleased to announce the completion of the repository conversion. The CVS repositories have been permanently frozen (an extra commit will be added to them to help direct folks that try them at the new repos).

Development of VTK, ParaView, IceT, and Xdmf is now officially hosted by Git. All repositories may be browsed online via gitweb:

http://vtk.org/gitweb
http://paraview.org/gitweb

The individual gitweb pages show the repository URLs.
The git clone/fetch URLs for the repositories are:

git://vtk.org/VTK.git
git://vtk.org/VTKData.git
git://paraview.org/ParaView.git
git://paraview.org/ParaViewData.git
git://public.kitware.com/IceT.git
git://public.kitware.com/Xdmf.git

Replace "git://" with "http://" to get http protocol access.

The Wiki pages have been updated to refer to the offici

Adopt A Bug 2.0

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The ITK development team is hosting another bugathon with Adopt-A-Bug 2.0. Users can volunteer to adopt-a-bug. In doing so you agree to either fix the bug, or pester/motivate/encourage developers to fix the bug.

Bug adopters will receive full ITK-developer status, including:

CVS write access;

MANTIS tracker developer status;

and recognition in the ITK Wiki.

Visit the ITK Wiki for more information.

VTK and ParaView to Make Transition to Git

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Over the next few days we will transition both VTK and ParaView to Git. Additional details are available on these Wiki pages (under development):

http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/Git
http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView/Git

We've already released the binaries for ParaView and the binaries for VTK will be available soon. Our timeline for the permanent transition is:

April 16: Have Kitware-maintained VTK and ParaView dashboard clients transitioned to use new "vtk_common" and "paraview_common" helper scripts that provide a single point of change for switching from CVS to Git.

April 19: Lock VTK and ParaView CVS repositories, push final changes to Git, switch all dashboards over to Git. There will be a final commit to CVS after this that adds a message() to

DARPA Awards Kitware with $99,000 to Pioneer Adaptive, Geospatial Visual Information System

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Research to increase safety and effectiveness of missions by improving battlefield information delivery

Kitware has received a $99,000 grant from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop an adaptive geospatial visual information system that will improve the dissemination of knowledge contained in data sources through the configuration of data preferences and density preference.

The core of Kitware's research will focus on overcoming suboptimal data access due to either network or device constraints and allowing for adaption to individual cognitive preferences. Individual users will be able to select and prioritize their desired data sources and adjust the parameters for visual information density of the display based upon preference, network, or the capabilities of their web-enabled device. Data feed preferences are then saved within a user profile to allow for automatic future adjustment.

Kitware Awarded $600K NIH Grant to Advance Neurosurgical Simulation

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has received a two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) totaling more than $600,000 to focus research efforts on developing approach-specific, multi-GPU, multi-tool, high-realism neurosurgery simulation. The goal of the research is to work toward an interactive simulator that replicates future neurosurgery cases of young surgeons, enabling hospitals faced with compressed intern schedules to accelerate training and improve skills.

"Simulation has made limited inroads in neurosurgery despite its proven advantages over traditional surgical training," said Dr. Michel Audette, R&D Engineer at Kitware. "Our objective is to empower the neurosurgical field with simulation training methods that directly correlate to better, more accurate patient care."
Historically, simulation has over-emphasized needle insertion and failed to address requirements of surgeons-in-training on potential caseloads. Existing simulators do not ably reconcile the conflicting clinical requirement

Kitware Launches Developer Blog

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware launched its first developer blog today which will be penned by Kitware's Research and Development Team and Corporate Leadership. The blog was designed to help our user community and those with an interest in specific Kitware toolkits, products or people, keep up with our current thoughts and interests.

Our team is free to write about whatever topic they'd like (of course, without violating any legal agreements). So what you see on the blog may not necessarily represent the views of Kitware as a whole, and you may even see dissenting opinions in the comments posted by other Kitware employees. Comments have been enabled so that you can interact with the posts as they go live. We encourage our readers to provide suggestions and engage in a dialogue with us and each other through the Kitware blog. While we do allow negative feedback, we will remove any spam, profanity, or excessively

MIDAS Goes Open Source

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is proud to announce that MIDAS is now available under a non-restrictive (BSD) open-source license. For the past year, MIDAS has been generating a lot of interest from the research community and we believe that opening its source code will lead to a better archiving and processing system. Starting with the new MIDAS release (2.4), MIDAS will be an open-source toolkit. We encourage users and developers to subscribe to the mailing list and report bugs and features requests.

MIDAS is a digital archiving and dissemination system written in PHP with a PostgreSQL backend. MIDAS is an extensible platform that allows developers to extend its functionality via plug-ins. The MIDAS framework combines a web front end with a database and supports media-filters for upload depending on the data type. For ins

Kitware Announces the VTK Journal

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Recently the VTK community has established an on-line VTK Journal. Like its sister, the Insight Journal, the VTK Journal supports open access publication, open data and open source to foster the growth of Open Science. We encourage you to visit and contribute articles and/or reviews to the VTK Journal.

Currently there are two articles in the Journal, with two more pending final publication. Once these two articles go live later today, the VTK users and developers lists will receive an automated email notifying the community of their availability. This is your cue to review and/or try out the submissions. This process will continue for future article submissions.

Kitware's open access journals are built on the MIDAS multimedia and data publication system. MIDAS, which is now an open source technology, is a general framework on which Kitware builds cu

Kitware Wins Phase I DOE SBIR for Visual Workflow

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been awarded a Phase I SBIR by the Department of Energy to develop an integrated visual workflow environment which supports increasingly data intensive scientific processes. The work will focus on the data management, comparison and evaluation of extremely large datasets. The open source visualization systems ParaView and VisIt, as well as other emerging data management tools such as MIDAS and the Globus Metadata Catalog Service will be used. Kitware plans to develop a flexible architecture so that other computational tools may be used in place of these in the future.

Kitware Wins Phase I NLM SBIR for Biomedical Research

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been awarded a Phase I SBIR by the National Library of Medicine to develop a flexible information visualization and analysis platform for biomedical research. This contracted effort will develop tools in support of ‘omics (genomics, proteomics, metabalomics) research by enabling the visualization of interrelated data in publicly available databases. Kitware is teamed with Michelle Williams from the University of Washington and Thomas O’Connell from the University of North Carolina.

Kitware Wins Phase II NIH STTR for Web-Based Image Analysis

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

This National Institutes of Health award “High Throughput Web-based Image Analysis of Mouse Brain MR Imaging Studies” will focus on developing a server-side processing infrastructure to the MIDAS system for the analysis of morphometry and connectivity for neuro-developmental and neuro-degenerative diseases.

Kitware Wins Phase I ARL SBIR For Mobile Ad-Hoc Network Analysis

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In this Phase I SBIR awarded by the Army Research Lab, Kitware will develop a mobile ad hoc network platform for ingestion, processing, and visualization of network simulation and scenario data. This platform will be based on an open-source, extensible system. The proposed technology will integrate statistics algorithms; use graph algorithms from the Boost Graph Library; and will make use of the open-source Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and OverView, an application designed to support informatics analysis and visualization methods.

Kitware is Awarded NAMIC Qt Supplement for Biomedical Computing

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware has been awarded a two year, approximately $350K, supplement to the NAMIC National Center for Biomedical Computing project. The goal of the project is to rewrite the Slicer KWWidgets-based GUI with Qt. Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin, Julien Finet and Sébastien Barré will be the primary implementers of this technology.

Kitware Wins Phase I DOE SBIR for AMR Streaming

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In this Phase I Department of Energy award, Kitware plans to extend its open source parallel visualization application, ParaView, to process Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) datasets by “streaming” them. Only the data that is being viewed will be loaded, processed and displayed. This will require a much smaller cluster than is currently needed to load and view entire AMR volumes.

Kitware Wins Phase II DOE SBIR for Collaborative Visualization

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) were awarded a Phase II SBIR by the Department of Energy to develop collaborative visualization tools for large-scale data. The proposed work will address the typical problems faced by geographically and organizationally separated research and engineering teams, who produce large data and wish to work together to analyze and understand that data.

Kitware Wins Phase I NCRR SBIR for DECT Angiography Bone Removal

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500

This Phase I SBIR awarded by the National Center for Research Resources will develop tools for dual energy segmentation and removal of bone from the vicinity of the carotid arteries. This technology will enable contrast enhanced angiography studies where the bone and vasculature anatomy can be confounded for a single energy CT scan. Kitware is teamed with Sandy Napel of Stanford University on this effort.

Kitware Welcomes New Employees & Interns

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team:

Casey Goodlett
Casey joined Kitware's North Carolina office in August 2009 as an R&D Engineer for the Biomedical Imaging team. Prior to joining Kitware, Casey was a member of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah where he completed his PhD in Computing.

Marcus Hanwell
Marcus Hanwell joined Kitware in October 2009 as an R&D Engineer for the Scientific Computing team. Marcus is one of the core developers of Avogadro and an active member of the Gentoo and KDE communities. He completed his BS and PhD in Physics from the University of Sheffield. His PhD and post-doctoral research involved both experimental and computational research, concerned primarily with the electrical
and structural characteristics of nanomaterials.

Kitware, Inc Receives 2009 Best of Clifton Park Award

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

WASHINGTON D.C. -- Kitware, Inc has been selected for the 2009 Best of Clifton Park Award in the Computer Software Development category by the U.S. Commerce Association (USCA).

The USCA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USCA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2009 USCA Award Program focused on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USCA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Commerce Association (USCA)

U.S. Commerce Association (USCA) is a Washington D.C. based organization funded by local businesse

2nd Biomedical Visualization Contest Winners

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware held its 2nd Annual Contest to find the best biomedical visualization made using the freely-available, open-source Visualization Toolkit and the Insight Registration and Segmentation Toolkit.

Judging for this contest was completed in a secure online environment and the winners were announced at 12th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, held September 20 - 24, 2009 in London, England.

This year's submissions employed the following software applications in creating their contest submissions: caBIG-XIP, 3D Slicer, Osirix<

Kitware, Inc. Ranks No. 3330 on the 2009 Inc. 5000 with Three-Year Sales Growth of 76.1%

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

NEW YORK, August 12, 2009 -- Inc. magazine today ranked Kitware, Inc. NO. 3330 on its third annual Inc. 5000, an exclusive ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies. The list represents the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy-America's independent-minded entrepreneurs. Consumer electronics maker Vizio, Internet giant GoDaddy, rental car service Zipcar, and beverage maker Honest Tea are among the prominent brands featured on this year's list.

"Savvy trend spotters and those who invest in private companies know that the Inc. 5000 is the best place to find out about young companies that are achieving success through a wide variety of unprecedented business models, as well as older private companies that are still expanding at an impressive rate," said Inc. 5000 project manager Jim Melloan. "That's why our list is so eagerly anticipated every year."

"We are pleased to be again named to the Inc. 5000, especially in this time of fi

ParaViewPro: Professional Support for ParaView

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is now offering a professional support package for ParaView, its open-source scientific visualization system. ParaViewPro allows subscribers to customize their support package based on their number of end users and computational clusters. The yearly subscriptions cover build and installation issues on the supported computational clusters, prioritized bug fixes, and usage questions for all supported end users.

The ParaViewPro support subscriptions are available for End-Users at $950 per year and as a cluster (Server) subscription for $1850 per year. The End-User Subscription covers all basic usage questions for ParaView, plus prioritized bug fixes and feature requests. The Server Subscription provides build and installation assistance for running the ParaView server on a single cluster.

Discounts are available for organizations wishing to obtain support on several servers for a group of end users. Please contact sales@kitware.com for a custom qu

Kitware to Host 2nd Annual Visualization Contest at MICCAI 2009

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is hosting its 2nd Annual Best Biomedical Visualization Contest in conjunction with MICCAI 2009, the 12th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention, which will be held in London from September 20-24.

The contest, which is open to the public, is being hosted at: public.kitware.com/ImageVote. Users may submit visualizations and cast votes after registering, for free, at the contest website. Visualizations may be charts, graphs, photographs, or renderings from the biomedical field.

All images must have been produced by programs that use ITK and/or VTK. To that effect we've generated a list of applications on the contest website and kitware.com which use ITK and VTK and are therefore e

Kitware Wins DOE Phase I SBIR

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has been awarded a Phase I SBIR from the Department of Energy entitled "Multi-Resolution Streaming for Remote Scalable Visualization." This project expands upon Kitware's expertise in Distance Visualization, which is becoming a critical area of research now that scientists and the massive amounts of data processed on supercomputers are often in two or more geographically separate locations. The goal of this Phase I award is to demonstrate a system that allows computational results to remain on the supercomputing system, while using a client-server architecture to process, analyze, and visualize the data. In order to achieve this goal, we will employ multi-resolution visualization methods that only load and display blocks of data, at the appropriate resolution, that are necessary for a particular visualization task.

MIDAS 2.2 Released

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

MIDAS, Kitware's digital archiving and distributed processing system, has seen its second major release in a year. MIDAS collects, manages and process digital media. Among the new features added are:

• Better policies management
• Improved navigation
• Faster database access and rendering
• New DICOM metadata extraction and search
• Improved security for private collections
• Faster search
• LDAP support
• Improved image gallery
• Initial support for custom workflow
• New web services API
• Redesigned grid computing management

Kitware's public instance of MIDAS is available at http://insight-journal.org/midas, and is host to hundreds of freely available scientific and medical datasets.

For more information about MIDAS and to downl

Bill Hoffman to Speak at OSCON 2009

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Bill Hoffman, Vice President and CTO for Kitware, will be presenting a session on "CMake/CTest/CDash/CPack - Build, Test, and Deploy Software in a Cross-Platform Development Environment" at OSCON 2009. The session will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 in the A7 Ballroom.

Publication Database 1.2

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

In conjunction with the overhauling of the MIDAS 2.2 framework,the Publication Database version 1.2 was also released this month. The Publication Database collects, manages and disseminates publications. Thanks to automatic import tools established in this release, importing papers from and searching for publications submitted by your institution has never been easier.

The Publication Database is based on open standards and ensures that submitted publications are referenced by major search engines, thus greatly improving the dissemination of current research and the publishing activities completed by your institution. The system also allows dynamically exporting, via web services, the content of the database to external websites, for instance listing the most recent publications for a user.

The Publication Database is currently used by the Surgical Planning Labo

VolView 3.2 Released

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VolView 3.2. This release is includes the following enhancements and bug fixes:

Enhancements:
• VolView now interfaces to the Open Source Lesion Sizing Toolkit. Through this interface, users are able to load a lung data set, use the VolView cropping planes to define a Volume of Interest, and then set a seed to get a segmentation of a lung nodule and an estimate of nodule volume.
• We improved the usability of changing between Pan/Slice/Zoom.
• Measurements can now be "locked" to a slice. In VolView 3.0 Beta, 2D measurements "floated" and were always interpreted in the context of the currently visible slice. In VolView 3.2, you can switch between this behavior and having them only associated with and visible on a singl

Kitware Grows, Expands Office Space

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware's office in North Carolina is moving! The move takes the office from its current two disjoint locations, to a single larger location with a capacity for 21 employees. The new address for the North Carolina (NC) office, starting May 1st, will be: 101 East Weaver Street, Suite G4, Carrboro, NC 27510.

Kitware's new North Carolina office will occupy nearly 4000 sq. ft. of modern office space in downtown Carrboro. The new office is located close the current offices, is within walking distance to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is in close proximity to Duke University and Research Triangle Park. As part of the move the office will be upgrading its phone systems, acquiring an expanded conference room and adding seating for eight new employees.

The North Carolina office has grown from two employees to twelve in just over two years. The seamless integration of Kitware's New York and North Carolina offices has made this rapid growth possible. New leaders within the group,

Kitware Excels on NIH Proposal

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Neurosurgical navigation systems have reduced the risk of complications from surgery and have allowed surgeons to remove tumors that were once considered inoperable. However, many techniques used by neurosurgical navigation systems to align pre- and intra-operative images are inaccurate when tissue deformations occur. Deformations commonly arise from tumor resection, gravitational effects on the organ, and the use of hyperosmotic drugs. Deformable intra-operative image registration remains a significant challenge for neurosurgical guidance.

In an NIH R01 grant proposal, "Image Registration for Ultrasound-Based Neurosurgical Navigation", submitted alongside Dr. William Wells from Brigham and Women's Hospital, Kitware proposed two new methods for registering preoperative MRI with intra-operative 3D ultrasound data during craniotomies for brain tumor resection.

The proposed methods will be delivered as part of an extensible "NeuralNav" toolkit that provides a common API for fetching tracker da

Computer Vision Group Wins 6 SBIR Proposals

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

In the fall, the Computer Vision Group was awarded 5 Phase I SBIRs and 1 Phase II SBIR, all from DARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office. The awards were primarily in the area of wide area video analysis and robotic vision.

Detecting and Tracking Multiple Moving Objects from a Moving Platform involves detecting and tracking moving people, vehicles and other objects near a moving robot, from cameras mounted on the robot. The University of Maryland is a subcontractor on this award. On Activity Models for Robots we plan to develop algorithms to recognize the group activity taking place around a robot, based on the observed tracks, and to determine how the robot should participate in the activity. The University of Maryland, the University of California, Berkeley and Georgia Tech will be serving subcontractors on this award. These two efforts will proceed in parallel; however, the tracking effort will provide input to the recognition effort. Both Phase I's will conclude in late summer, by whic

3-D Snapshots of Eyes Reveal Details of Age-Related Blindness

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Colleen Morrison
The Optical Society
202.416.1437
cmorri@osa.org

Devin Powell
American Institute of Physics
301.209.3099
dpowell@aip.org

Interactive Science Publishing Helps Researchers Examine the Problems of Age-Related Macular Degeneration in Unprecedented Detail

WASHINGTON, March 19- To get a better look at the abnormalities that cause age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss in Americans and Europeans over 50, the research groups of James Fujimoto at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and collaborators Jay Duker of the Tufts University School of Medicine, and Joel Schuman of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have created ultra-detailed 3-D images of the eyes of more than 2,000 people

Kitware Reorganizes, Welcomes New Shareholders

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

As a result of ongoing growth, Kitware is reorganizing Company operations and has formally added new shareholders. The Company will now be organized into the following levels of responsibility: Corporate Leadership, Management, Technical Leadership, Research Staff, Support Staff, and Interns as shown on the Kitware Team page. These changes are effective immediately.

Note that the Technical Leadership level has expanded to recognize the growing responsibilities, leadership qualities and technical excellence of several individuals. Utkarsh Ayachit, Brad Davis, Julien Jomier, Amitha Perera, and Wes Turner join Luis Ibáñez in this level. In addition, Stephen Aylward, Berk Geveci and Anthony Hoogs form Kitware's new Management level, overseeing the Medical Imaging, Scientific Computing and Computer Vision groups, respectively. Kitware would also like to welcome four new shareholders: Rick Avila, Stephen Ayl

Shining Light on Diabetes-Related Blindness

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Interactive Science Publishing Gives Researchers a Closer Look at a New Way
to Spot Leaky Blood Vessels in the Eyes

WASHINGTON, Mar. 11— A group of scientists in California is trying to develop a cheaper, less invasive way to spot the early stages of retinal damage from diabetic retinopathy, the leading cause of blindness in American adults, before it leads to blindness. As described in the special Interactive Science Publishing (ISP) issue of Optics Express, the Optical Society’s (OSA) open-access journal, the scientists are using beams of light to measure blood flow in the back of the eye.

“The more severe the retinopathy, the lower the blood flow to the retina,” say

VolView 3.0 Released

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VolView 3.0. VolView is an intuitive, interactive system for volume visualization that allows researchers to quickly explore and analyze complex 3D medical or scientific data on Windows, Mac and Linux computers. Users can easily load and interactively explore datasets using 2D and 3D display methods and tools. 3D tools include volume rendering, maximum intensity projections, and oblique reformatting. The ability to save an entire visualization session allows users to easily stop and start sessions. Advanced users can perform custom data processing using a simple plug-in API.

This release is a major upgrade of the VolView platform with several new capabilities including:

A simplified user interface including a toolbar for quick access to commonly used tools

Accelerated volume rendering including GPU acceleration on the Nvidia platform

NDI Chooses IGSTK for Medical Research

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Northern Digital Inc. (NDI), a world-leader in 3D measurement technology for medical, industrial and research applications utilized the Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and Slicer to demonstrate how open source software can be used to quickly develop medical research applications. NDI demonstrated their Aurora System, which integrates IGSTK and Slicer with NDI technology, at the IGSTK User Group Meeting held in conjunction with SPIE 2009. NDI’s Aurora System uses and 18-gauge needle containing a tiny electromagnetic sensor at its tip; utilizing the Aurora System researchers are able to view the needle on a diagnostic image, updated in real-time as it is manipulated to quickly and accurately target a lesion represented in an anatomical phantom.

IGSTK, an open source software toolkit developed by Kitware in collaboration with ISIS

Kitware Sponsors Camp KDE

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware is sponsoring the first annual Camp KDE. Camp KDE 2009 is KDE's first annual developer conference to take place West of the Atlantic. This conference is a by-product of the very successful KDE 4 Release Event held in Mountain View, California. It is intended to ensure that KDE's presence in the world is not simply seen as being Euro-centric.

Camp KDE 2009 will be held at the Travellers Beach Resort in Negril, Jamaica January 17 - 23, 2009.

NIH Grant Supports Research Into Mapping the Brain With Machine Vision

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

For as much as we know about the human body, the inner workings of the brain remain elusive. This lack of understanding has precluded the development of a neuroprosthetic device, or brain implant, that is truly biocompatible with brain tissue. A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Professor Badri Roysam has secured a $2.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a new, open source software toolkit for analyzing 3-D multichannel brain images — a critical step toward the development of a viable brain implant.

Such a permanent or long-term brain implant could benefit any number of individuals who have suffered brain trauma, but so far, researchers have been unsuccessful in developing neuroprosthetics that are not ultimately rejected and rendered useless by the surrounding brain tissue.

The multiyear project aims to arm biologists and other brain experts with the ability to better map, understand, and quantify the complex interactions between the comp

Kitware Welcomes New Employees

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team.

Chuck Atkins, R&D Engineer
Chuck joined Kitware as an R&D Engineer for the Computer Vision team. Chuck's current research is in scalable software systems for video processing. Prior to joining Kitware Chuck worked as a Senior Systems Analyst for Hutchinson Technology Inc. (HTI) in the Advanced Vision Development group where he was one of the three primary software developers on a high resolution multi-camera, multi-node visual inspection system. Chuck received his BS in Computer Science from Oklahoma State University.

Matt Bowman, Systems Administrator
Matt will be maintaining all Information Technology aspects of the company. Prior to joining Kitware Matt worked as an IT manager for Informz Inc., an email marketing company. Matt received his B.S. in Computer Science degree from State University of New York in Oneonta.

VTKEdge Released

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has enabled public read access to the VTKEdge source code repository. VTKEdge is still in the alpha stage right now, with continued development expected over the next few months. Highlights of the initial release include:

Advanced GPU volume ray casting

Illuminated lines painter

Surface LIC painter

GPU accelerated filters for 2D LIC

Feldkamp reconstruction (CPU and GPU versions)

GPU accelerated array processing

Powerful pixel / voxel editing widgets

Please visit the VTKEdge web site at vtkedge.org for additional information and download instructions.

Kitware, Inc. Receives 2008 Best of Clifton Park Award

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

WASHINGTON D.C., October 15, 2008 -- Kitware, Inc. has been selected for the 2008 Best of Clifton Park Award in the Computer Software category by the U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA).

The USLBA "Best of Local Business" Award Program recognizes outstanding local businesses throughout the country. Each year, the USLBA identifies companies that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These are local companies that enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community.

Various sources of information were gathered and analyzed to choose the winners in each category. The 2008 USLBA Award Program focused on quality, not quantity. Winners are determined based on the information gathered both internally by the USLBA and data provided by third parties.

About U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA)

U.S. Local Business Association (USLBA) is a Washington D.C. based organizatio

Kitware, OSA release software for Interactive Scientific Publishing

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Technology Enables Researchers to Interact with Author Data

Clifton Park, NY October 29 – Kitware is pleased to announce the launch of OSA’s Interactive Science Publishing (ISP) system. ISP is the first open-access scientific publication system that allows authors to distribute imaging datasets and advanced visualizations over the Internet for interactive display. The dissemination of information and data using novel software technology and systems falls directly in line with Kitware’s organizational goals and its efforts to advance publishing systems for open science. OSA ISP is a unique publishing system that enables researchers to create active publications supporting direct interaction with the data referred to in the publication.

“Kitware is delighted to have partnered with the Optical Society of America and the National Library of Medicine to develop and la

Kitware Sponsors VisWeek 2008

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is a Gold Sponsor for IEEE VisWeek 2008 which will be held October 19-24, 2008, in Columbus, Ohio. VisWeek 2008 is the premier forum for data and information visualization advances for academia, government, and industry. This event brings together researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in tools, techniques, and technology. The conferences and symposium include exciting and informative collections of workshops, tutorials, papers, panels, demonstrations, posters, and exhibitions.

New Open Source Project Sites

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In late October Kitware will launch the new ParaView (paraview.org) and CDash (cdash.org) websites. The new CMake (cmake.org) site went live at the beginning of September. Additionally, a brand new site for the new VTKEdge toolkit (vtkedge.org) will go live in late October as well. The new site design is focused on providing researchers and developers with streamlined access to information and will provide users with a multitude of resources to assist in development, creating easier access to licensing information, related publications, ways to get involved with the projects, and resources for development and support. Additionally, the new sites are uniformly designed so that users will find consistency when accessing information from project to project.

Kitware awarded SBIR Phase II for 'Co-Processing for Unsteady CFD Simulations'

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware was recently awarded a Phase II SBIR from the Department of Defense. The purpose of this project is to develop tools for co-processing unsteady CFD codes for the purpose of visualization and analysis.

As the compute capability of our computational resources grows, we are facing a discrepancy between our ability to produce results and store them for analysis. We are quickly outstripping the capability of IO resources to store results from time-dependent simulations and the capability of post-processing tools running on small- to medium-sized clusters to analyze such data. The main objective of this SBIR is to integrate core data processing with the simulation to enable scalable data analysis.

The Phase I effort focused on developing a prototype of a distributed co-processing system capable of processing, at run-time, results of large and distributed simulations. During Phase I, we developed a co-processing library prototype and successfully tested it with two CFD codes: Overflow from

Large Scale Visualization with ParaView Tutorial at Supercomputing 2008

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Berk Geveci, Utkarsh Ayachit and Dave DeMarle from Kitware and Ken Moreland and John Greenfield from Sandia National Labs will be presenting a tutorial on “Large Scale Visualization with Paraview” on Monday November 17 during the Supercomputing 2008 conference. This tutorial presents the architecture of ParaView and the fundamentals of parallel visualization. Attendees will learn the basics of using ParaView for scientific visualization with hands-on lessons. The tutorial will provide an introduction to scripting and extending ParaView and provide attendees with detailed guidance for visualizing the massive simulations run on today’s supercomputers. Attendees should bring laptops to the tutorial so that they may install ParaView and follow along with the demonstrations.

ParaView is a powerful open-source turnkey application for analyzing and visualizing large data sets in parallel. Regularly used by Sandia National Laboratories analysts to visualize simulat

Advanced ParaView Visualization Tutorial at VisWeek 2008

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

ParaView is a powerful open-source turnkey application for analyzing and visualizing scientific datasets ranging from small desktop-sized problems to the world’s largest simulations. ParaView is used by numerous government, educational, and commercial institutions throughout the world. Designed to be configurable, extendible, and scalable, ParaView is built upon the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to allow for the rapid deployment of visualization components. Through this tutorial, organizer Kenneth Moreland of the Sandia National Labs brought together David Thompson (Sandia), Timothy Shead (Sandia), John Biddiscombe (CSCS) and Utkarsh Ayachit (Kitware) whom are all designers and builders of ParaView as means of giving researchers and developers detailed guidance on the behavior and abilities of the ParaView application.

This knowledge allowed the tutorial participants to solve their unique visualization problems, modify the ParaView application to their specific problem domains, or l

Kitware Wins DoE Phase I SBIR to Develop Collaborative Visualization with ParaView

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has won a $100K Phase I SBIR with the Department of Energy. The proposed work aims to develop a parallel visualization system that will enable effective multiple remote collaborations for complex analysis in a large-scale data environment. We are partnering with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). We expect to commercialize this work by using the open source ParaView project as a technology deployment platform. We will be commercializing add-on modules that extend ParaView to address domain-specific needs.

Kitware Wins Air Force Phase I STTR for Feature Extraction with ParaView

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has partnered with David Thompson at Mississippi State University and Raghu Machiraju at Ohio State University on a Phase I Air Force STTR. Since this is an STTR, David Thompson will be the academic partner leading this work. In the proposed work, ParaView will serve as the application framework upon which we will build feature extraction techniques for computational fluid dynamics. In particular, we will focus on complex, turbulent flow problems. These datasets are necessarily temporal in extent and exceptionally large in size. MSU and OSU have developed complex algorithms for feature extraction that we will incorporate into VTK and ParaView, with the goal of commercializing add-on modules.

Kitware Awarded $6.7M DARPA Contract

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware will develop, evaluate and deploy a prototype system for content-based video retrieval

On September 11, 2008, Kitware was awarded a $6,735,503 Phase I contract for the Video and Image Retrieval and Analysis Tool (VIRAT) program by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Kitware competed with 19 other companies for the contract.

Kitware’s team proposed building a revolutionary video analyst workstation called Video and Image-Based Retrieval and ANalysis Tool (VIBRANT). VIBRANT will leverage the most promising technologies in computer vision, video data indexing, and content-based retrieval in an integrated system that will filter and prioritize massive amounts of archived and streaming video. The most high-value intelligence content will be clearly and intuitively presented to the video analyst, resulting in substantial reductions in analyst workload per mission as well as increasing the quality and accuracy of intelligence yield.

Curr

Kitware, Inc. Ranks No. 3026 on the 2008 Inc. 5,000 List With Three-Year Sales Growth of 117.3%

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Clifton Park, NY, August 22, 2008 – Inc. ranked Kitware, Inc. No. 3026 on its annual ranking of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the country. The list is the most comprehensive look at the most important segment of the economy – America’s independent-minded entrepreneurs.

“Our second annual Inc. 5000 continues the most ambitious project in business journalism,” said Inc. 5000 Project Manager Jim Melloan. “The Inc. 5000 gives an unrivalled portrait of young, underreported companies across all industries doing fascinating things with cutting-edge business models demonstrating impressive growth.”

“As an open source software company with an unorthodox business model it is gratifying to be recognized as one of the fastest growing companies. We feel that is an affirmation of the Company's technical excellence, our high level of customer satisfaction, and long term prospe

CDash 1.0 Released

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

CDash the open-source, web-based software testing server has had its first official release. CDash aggregates, analyzes and displays the results of software testing processes submitted from clients located around the world, conveying the state of a software system to continually improve its quality. We have transitioned almost all Kitware software projects to CDash at this point; the database for the public Kitware
Open Source projects is about 20GB and at this point is very reliable and stable.

The 1.0 release adds the following features:

CDash automatically detects when the timing for a test has slowed down significantly

The number of nightly changes is now displayed on the main project page

Ability to mark compile warnings, compile errors and test failures with “fix in progress” or “fixed”

CTest 2.6 timestamp information is used when available

Support was added for different cvs/svn web viewers including Fishe

Kitware Welcomes New Employees

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team.

Julien Finet, arrived from France where he worked as a consultant to GE's Advantage workstation group, specifically the cardiac analysis project. He is an outstanding C++ programmer and has extensive image analysis experience. He has an MS in computer science and engineering from the University of Technology of Compiegne. He will be working in Kitware's North Carolina office.

Burlen Loring, joins us from the University of New Hampshire’s Institute for the Study of Earth Oceans and Space, Space Science Center where he developed Python-Tk and Qt-C++ visualization applications using VTK for the OpenGGCM global magnetospheric CFD code and an application for converting CHOMBO HDF5 datasets into VTK format. Burlen received his BS in Interdisciplinary Mathematics-Physics and his MS in Applied Mathematics from UNH. Burlen is working in the Clifton Park office.

KDE 4.0.0 was officially released. This is the next cutting-edge version of KDE, consisting of the KDE libraries, the workspace (desktop, start panel, window manager), and applications (such as kOffice, kDevelop, etc.). One of the major features of KDE 4 is that it now runs natively on Mac OSX and on Windows, beyond the previous Linux platforms. Such cross-platform support is now possible in major part because KDE is now built using CMake, the cross-platform build, test, package and software process tool

For more information, watch this Wikipedia) is a 2007 Nobel Laureate in Medicine. Working with Mario R. Capecchi and Sir Martin J. Evans, Dr. Smithies won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells. See NobelPrize.org.

Kitware worked with Dr. Smithies and successfully received an NIH Phase I STTR grant to construct detailed anatomical models of gene expression when mice hearts undergo stress. The models were made by stitching and stacking 3D confocal micropscopy images taken from thinly-sliced tissue sections of mice hearts. Dr. Smithies' team manipulated the genes of the mice so that their heart cells would fluoresce when certain genes within them were activated. The confocal microscopy images captured the florescence from excised tissue samples. Kitware's reconstructio

Kitware's Brad Davis is awarded the Marr Prize

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The Marr prize is one of the highest recognitions in the field of image analysis/computer vision. The Marr Prize is awarded to the best paper at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). The award winning paper at the 2007 ICCV conference was authored by Kitware's Brad Davis:

Bradley Davis, P. Thomas Fletcher, Elizabeth Bullitt, Sarang Joshi: Population Shape Regression From Random Design Data

Co-authors were Tom Fletcher and Saranh Joshi of The University of Utah and Elizabeth Bullitt of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The underlying research was part of Brad's work as a Ph.D. student at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

About Kitware:

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitwa

Kitware Establishes Computer Vision Group, Anthony Hoogs to Lead

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. is pleased to announce the establishmemt of a computer vision group led by Dr. Anthony Hoogs. Dr. Hoogs is a internationally recognized researcher who over the past fifteen years has supervised and performed research in various areas of computer vision including event, activity and behavior recognition, motion pattern learning and anomaly detection, visual semantics, tracking, learning, image segmentation, object recognition, and content-based retrieval. Dr. Hoogs received his PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998 for research on image segmentation, object representation and learning in computer vision. Previously, he received his MS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 for research in algebraic object representation. He graduated with a BA Magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1989.

At GE Global Research (1998-2007), Dr. Hoogs led a team of resear

KWWidgets Update

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400

There has not been an official release of KWWidgets. However, the following features have been added to the project recently. You can download KWWidgets from www.kwwidgets.org/Wiki/KWWidgets#Download.

• Improvements in the state machine framework with the workflow wizard (currently used by the EMSegment module in NAMIC Slicer3.) The vtkKWStateMachineDOTWriter can use its output to create figures/diagrams automatically using graphviz's dot or to create them dynamically into a Wiki that supports it. The following figure was generated on the fly in the Kitware Wiki: public.kitware.com/Wiki/User:Barre#State_Machine. Check the page source to see how this was accomplished.
• vtkKWLogWidget can be used to log VTK Error/Warning macro output. This is currently used by the main application of NAMIC Slicer3. This

KWWidgets Update

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

There has not been an official release of KWWidgets. However, the following features have been added to the project recently. You can download KWWidgets from www.kwwidgets.org/Wiki/KWWidgets#Download.

• State machine framework with workflow wizard. (See vtkKWStateMachine, vtkKWWizardWorkflow.) This is currently used by the EMSegment module in NAMIC Slicer3. The vtkKWStateMachineDOTWriter can use its output to create figures/diagrams automatically using graphviz's dot, or dynamically into a Wiki that supports it.
• VTK's Error/Warning macros can be redirected to a vtkKWLogWidget. This is currently used by the main application of NAMIC Slicer3. This widget can be used to display various types of records/events in the form of a multicolumn log. Each record is time-stamped automatically, and the interface allows the user to sort the list by time, type, or description. This w

Technical Books

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Visualization Toolkit: An Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics, 4th edition (ISBN 1-930934-19-X) has been recently updated for VTK 5. This new hardcover version is 528 pages long and is printed in full color. It is available from Kitware's on-line store (http://www.kitware.com/products/vtktextbook.html) and from Amazon.com.

Air Force Research Labs awards Kitware Phase II SBIR

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0500

The Air Force Research Labs has awarded Kitware Inc. a Phase II SBIR to automate the segmentation of 3D image datasets, for the purpose of converting this segmented datasets into simulation models. In addition, Kitware will develop semi-automatic methods including editing tools (i.e., 3D widgets) for manually guiding or modifying the results of segmentation tasks.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Ala

DOD Awards Kitware Phase II STTR for High-Performance GPU Computing

Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The DOD Army Research Lab has Awarded Kitware a Phase II STTR for accelerated data processing and rendering using GPU technologies. The focus of the work is to utilize the graphical processing unit to support of the ParaView visualization system. Recent advances in graphics hardware (and associated software libraries) enables the GPU to be programmed for a variety of tasks. This offers a significant opportunity for improving performance since GPUs have been previously relegated to rendering data; now they can be used for modeling and processing data. The PI for this award is Dr. Amitabh Varshney at the University of Maryland College Park.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as t

Kitware Releases Version 5.0 of VTK Users Guide

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

VTK Users Guide has been updated for VTK Version 5.0. It includes several new additions such as a description of VTK's new pipeline architecture. The User's Guide is now printed in full color and is available now from Kitware's e-store.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the A

KWWidgets Update

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Although KWWidgets has been under development for quite some time, and some of the classes had been released as part of the ParaView distribution, the KWWidget project only recently became its own toolkit with an associated web site (www.kwwidgets.org), mailing list, FAQ, and Wiki. Currently, the development code is available via CVS. Kitware intends to release the first official version of KWWidgets in conjunction with the release of VTK 5.2. Thereafter, KWWidgets releases will coincide with VTK releases.

Technical Books Update

Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Three of Kitware's technical books have been recently revised. The ITK Software Guide (ISBN 1-930934-15-7) has been updated for ITK version 2.4, and is 832 pages. The ParaView Guide (ISBN 1-930934-17-3) has been updated for ParaView 2.4, and is 384 pages. Mastering CMake (ISBN 1-930934-16-5) has been updated for CMake 2.4, and is 256 pages.

These books can be ordered directly through Kitware at www.kitware.com or from Amazon.com. Kitware is currently revising The Visualization Toolkit, and The VTK User's Guide for VTK 5.0. These titles will be available
Summer 2006.

Kitware Welcomes New Employee

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes several new employees to the team.

Jeffrey Baumes, currently a PhD student at RPI who will graduate in August. Mr. Baumes' expertise is in graph theory, and will work at Kitware to strengthen VTK's information visualization capabilities. Jeff is working at Kitware's Clifton Park office.

Dave Partyka, formerly of AutoQuant, has expertise in software process. Dave is working at Kitware's Clifton Park office.

Wes Turner, formerly of GE Research, with expertise in geometry and CAD (computer-aided detection). Wes is working at Kitware's Clifton Park office.

Brad Davis, who is currently a PhD student at UNC-CH with a focus on atlas-based segmentation. Brad is working at Kitware's Chapel Hill office.

To learn more about these new employees, please visit Kitware's Team Members listed in our company profile.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical i

DOD Awards Kitware Phase I SBIR for Automatic Segmentation

Mon, 10 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0400

The DOD Air Force Research Lab has awarded Kitware a Phase I SBIR for automating the segmentation of 3D image datasets, for the purpose of converting this segmented datasets into simulation models. In addition, Kitware will develop semi-automatic methods including editing tools (i.e., 3D widgets) for manually guiding or modifying the results of segmentation tasks.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Ala

NSF Awards Kitware Phase II SBIR for Volume Rendering of AMR Datasets

Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:00:00 -0500

The National Science Foundation has Awarded Kitware a Phase II SBIR for volume rendering of adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) data. AMR data is used by many scientists and engineers to simulate processes such as astrophysical dynamics, combustion, fluid flow, and hydrodynamics. Volume rendering is a technique to "see into" 3D data much like an X-ray. By developing the ability to volume render AMR data, Kitware will extend the power of AMR simulations, and provide researchers with a new tool to visualize their data.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly

Kitware Established North Carolina Office and Welcomes New Employees

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Inc. is pleased to announce that it has established a Chapel Hill, North Carolina office. The Chapel Hill office will be led by Dr. Stephen Aylward, Chief Medical Scientist, and Julien Jomier, a member of Kitware's research staff. The role of the Chapel Hill office will be to extend the company's ties to the medical research community, and to support current efforts in medical image processing.

Previous to establishing Kitware's Chapel Hill office, Dr. Stephen Aylward was director of the CADDLab as a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Radiology at UNC. The CADDLab is the Image Processing Core Facility for the School of Medicine and a component of the Small Animal Imaging Core for UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Research Center. Additionally, Dr. Aylward serves as President of the Insight Software Consortium and as an Associated Editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

Under Dr. Aylward's direction, the CADDLab has a history of successful collaborati

DOD Awards Kitware Phase I SBIR for High-Performance GPU Computing

Sun, 10 Jul 2005 00:00:00 -0400

The DOD Army Research Lab has Awarded Kitware a Phase I STTR for accelerated data processing and rendering using GPU technologies. The focus of the work is to utilize the graphical processing unit to support of the ParaView visualization system. Recent advances in graphics hardware (and associated software libraries) enables the GPU to be programmed for a variety of tasks. This offers a significant opportunity for improving performance since GPUs have been previously relegated to rendering data; now they can be used for modeling and processing data. The PI for this award is Dr. Amitabh Varshney at the University of Maryland College Park.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as

Sandia National Labs Achieves Breakthrough Performance Using NVIDIA(R) Technology For Scientific Visualization

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. and SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sandia National Labs, Kitware Inc., and NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA - News) today announced a breakthrough in large data scientific visualization, attaining rendering rates of over 1.5 billion polygons per second.

The breakthrough was achieved with ParaView (www.paraview.org), an open source visualization application developed by Kitware Inc. (www.kitware.com), processing data in the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program at the three national laboratories: Sandia National Labs (SNL); Los Alamos National Labs (LANL); Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL).

Visualization is an integral component of ASC and is essential to understanding the massive data produced in simulations for national security. One of the world's largest polygonal datasets is a 473 million triangle is

Kitware Welcomes New Employee

Thu, 10 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware welcomes Rick Avila as Director of Medical Applications. Mr. Avila, was formerly at GE Research where he started and led the first Computer Aided Detection (CAD) program. In his role at Kitware, Rick is leading the development of open source imaging toolkits and products that significantly improve the effectiveness of healthcare including image-guided intervention, quantitative disease and therapy assessment, and clinical image interpretation. To learn more about new employees, please visit Kitware's Team Members listed in our company profile.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software.

NSF Awards Kitware Phase I SBIR for Volume Rendering of AMR Datasets

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The National Science Foundation has Awarded Kitware a Phase I SBIR for volume rendering of adaptive multiresolution (AMR) data. AMR data is used by many scientists and engineers to simulate processes such as astrophysical dynamics, combustion, fluid flow, and hydrodynamics. Volume rendering is a technique to "see into" 3D data much like an X-ray. By developing the ability to volume render AMR data, Kitware will extend the power of AMR simulations, and provide researchers with a new tool to visualize their data.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly g

Kitware Teams to Create the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware Inc., a high-tech software company specializing in imaging, 3D graphics, and visualization, is part of a team awarded one of four grants by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) dedicated to advancing biomedical research. In a highly-competitive review process, the NIH awarded four prestigious National Centers of Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) to "develop and implement the core of a universal computing infrastructure that is urgently needed to speed progress in biomedical research. The centers will create innovative software programs and other tools that enable the biomedical community to integrate, analyze, model, simulate, and share data on human health and disease." Members of the winning team include Brigham and Womens Hospital, MIT, Harvard, Mass General Hospital, Kitware, GE Research, Georgia Tech, Dartmouth, UC San Diego, UCLA, the University of Utah, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Isomics, Inc. The grant awards for the four NCBCs total $79.7 million dollars over a five ye

DOE awards SBIR Phase II to Kitware for Grid Visualization

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project from the DOE to develop a scalable, grid enabled, collaborative visualization environment to support the emerging distributed computing network. Grid computing is viewed by many technologists as a promising software technology to leverage distributed resources across the internet, allowing organizations to utilize distant resources and access remote data. Kitware will develop automation tools for deploying software applications written with VTK (vtk.org) and ITK (itk.org) software systems onto the grid. Currently grid deployment is a diffuclt process requiring significant expertise. Kitware's goal is to simplify this process so that engineers and scientists without grid experience can deploy their computational tools with minimal effort.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, compute

NIH awards STTR Phase II to Kitware for Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has won a Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II project from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health (NBIB/NIH). The goal of the project is to develop an open-source, image-guided surgery toolkit. This project is being led by Dr. Kevin Cleary at the Georgetown University Medical Center. The projects leverages Kitware's current expertise with the Visualization Toolkit (VTK at vtk.org) and the Insight Medical Imaging Toolkit (ITK at itk.org) to produce a software framework for the creation of surgical applications guided by real-time imaging modalities such as ultrasound and CT fluoroscopy. The goal is to produce a simple, fail-safe and robust software toolkit that can be used to create a variety of surgical applications.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer visi

Georgetown University and Kitware awarded Phase II STTR from NIH for open-source image guided surgery toolkit

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Minimally invasive abdominal interventions are rapidly increasing in popularity. This is due to the development of new interventional techniques-and the desire on the part of both clinicians and patients to decrease trauma. Minimally invasive interventions are done using catheters, needles, or other instruments that are introduced, targeted, and manipulated without the benefit of the direct visibility afforded by the usual surgical opening. This greatly minimizes trauma to the patient, but severely restricts the physician's view of the underlying anatomy. Image-guided surgery, however, circumvents this encumbrance. It uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) scans to guide minimally invasive surgical procedures. The scans are typically taken before and during surgery.

Kitware will team with Dr. Kevin Cleary and his staff at Georgetown University to develop software tools to support the tracking and control of image-guided surgical instrumentation. The software will be creat

Kitware Releases Version 4.4 of VTK Users Guide

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

VTK Users Guide is now updated for Version 4.4. It has updated with several new features including new object diagrams and filter summaries.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental research labs. Our commercial customers range from Fortune 500 oil a

Kitware Awarded Teams with UNC for Phase I STTR from NBIB/NIH

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has been awarded a Phase I STTR to develop support for large histological data sets. Dr. Stephen Aylward at the University of North Carolina is Principle Investigator for the project. UNC's role will be acquire animal (i.e., mouse) data, and to perform interslice registration. Kitware will provide high-performance volume rendering for the datasets, and build XML middleware to support the hierarchical nature of the data.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; includ

Kitware To Develop 3D Segmentation and Registration Interaction Widgets

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has been tasked by the National Library of Medicine to develop 3D widgets for segmentation and registration. These widgets will be used to assist in manual and semi-automatic tasks of image segmentation and registration. Such tasks often require human intervention, and these interactor widgets will greatly improve the efficiency of the process. The widgets will be provided in open-source form in the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) system, and designed for use with either VTK or ITK (Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit).

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established

Kitware To Develop Automated ITK Journal Publishing System

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has been contracted by the National Library of Medicine to develop an automated journal publishing system for the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit. The goal of this work is to set of a process that enables developers of ITK to automatically submit work consisting of software, data and documentation. The system will evaluate the quality of the submission (i.e., the quality of the code), and automatically incorporate it into the journal if the work passes muster. Users will also be able to read and rate the quality of the submission; insuring that the best work receives the greatest publicity.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and R

Kitware Wins Contract from NLM for Long-Term ITK Maintenance

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has been granted a contract by the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NLM/NIH) to perform ongoing maintenance of the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). This maintenance includes supporting and porting ITK on computing platforms; extending ITK's class structure, performing bug fixes and quality enhancements; and building interfaces from ITK to other systems. ITK is a premiere, open-source system used around the world in medical image analysis.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing

Kitware Welcomes New Employee

Tue, 10 Aug 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes Kurt Wideman (Director of Sales and Marketing) to the team. To learn more about new employees, please visit Kitware's Team Members listed in our company profile.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental research labs. Our commercial

Kitware to Extend Laser Ultrasound Software Development

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has signed an agreement with GE Global Research to increase LaserUT operator efficiency and accuracy. We will be transitioning the technology originally developed at GE GRC and integrate it with the production LaserUT software in use within Lockheed Martin.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs

Kitware Releases Second Edition of Mastering CMake

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Mastering CMake is now updated for Version 2.0. This book includes chapters on producing test dashboards and DART testing. A full reference of CMakes commands and variables with descriptions is included.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental resea

Kitware Welcomes New Employees

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes Donna Kochis (Office Manager) and Francois Bertel (R&D Engineer) to the team. To learn more about Kitware employees, please visit Kitware's Team Members listed in our company profile.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental rese

Kitware and Pfizer Engage in Joint Development

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware and Pfizer have signed a multiyear joint development agreement to extend Pfizer's repertoire of cutting edge image analysis software.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental research labs. Our commercial customers range from Fortune 500 oil

Kitware Welcomes New Employee

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware welcomes Utkarsha Ayachit (Software Engineer) to the team. To learn more about Kitware employees, please visit Kitware's Team Members listed in our company profile.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental research labs. Our commercial custom

Kitware Inc. moves to new office space.

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware Inc. outgrows the old office space and is moving to a new building on Thursday, February 26th. There may be some unexpected outages in the phone and internet connectivity through March 1st.

The new Kitware address is:
Kitware Inc.
28 Corporate Drive
Suite 204
Clifton Park, NY 12065

The phone and fax numbers will remain the same:
Phone: 1-518-371-3971
Fax: 1-518-371-4573

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and developm

Kitware Welcomes New Employees

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware welcomes Mathieu Malaterre (R&D Engineer) and Russell Blue (R&D Engineer) to the team. To learn more about Kitware employees, please visit Kitware's Team Members listed in our Company profile.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Army and Air Force Research labs, and a variety of academic, commercial and governmental

Kitware Wins Los Alamos National Laboratory Contract

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The US DOE has awarded Kitware, Inc. a development contract to extend their research tools in parallel visualization. The contract is focused on extending ParaView, a configurable turnkey application developed to deliver visualization research implemented in VTK to the LANL end-user community.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health, the Arm

VolView 2.0 Released

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VolView 2.0, a powerful volume visualization and analysis system that allows researchers to view and process data from a variety of imaging modalities including CT, MRI, and confocal microscopy. VolView is also used to visualize the results of scientific simulations, and synthesized volumetric data. VolView is designed for ease-of-use, flexibility, and performance on standard desktop systems.

VolView 2.0 has many new features including:

Support for all data types (unsigned char through double)

Support for up to four independent components

Support for color/alpha, RGB, and RGBA volumes

Over 30 basic and advanced image processing filters

Plug-in API allows any developer to extend filtering capabilities

Collaboration between two VolView sessions

New interactive annotation widgets:

Color bar, scale bar, orientation marker

Dis

DOE awards SBIR Phase I to Kitware for Grid visualization

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware, Inc. has won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from the DOE to develop a scalable, grid enabled, collaborative visualization environment to support the emerging distributed computing network. Grid computing is viewed by many technologists as a promising software technology to leverage distributed resources across the internet, allowing organizations to utilize distant resources and access remote data. Kitware will integrate selected software systems into the Grid framework, and produce three prototype applications demonstrating isocontouring, large data rendering, and deformable registration.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and

Georgetown University and Kitware awarded Phase I STTR from NIH for open-source image guided surgery toolkit

Sat, 10 May 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Minimally invasive abdominal interventions are rapidly increasing in popularity. This is due to the development of new interventional techniques-and the desire on the part of both clinicians and patients to decrease trauma. Minimally invasive interventions are done using catheters, needles, or other instruments that are introduced, targeted, and manipulated without the benefit of the direct visibility afforded by the usual surgical opening. This greatly minimizes trauma to the patient, but severely restricts the physician's view of the underlying anatomy. Image-guided surgery, however, circumvents this encumbrance. It uses magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) scans to guide minimally invasive surgical procedures. The scans are typically taken before and during surgery.

Kitware will team with Dr. Kevin Cleary and his staff at Georgetown University to develop software tools to support the tracking and control of image-guided surgical instrumentation. The software will be creat

Kitware wins SBIR Phase II award from NSF for higher-order finite element visualization.

Mon, 10 Mar 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Inc. has won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project to address the lack of visualization technology for advanced engineering simulation tools. Such tools routinely depend on interpolation and approximation (basis) functions for a variety of purposes, including modeling geometry via CAD/CAM tools, or for computational techniques such as the finite element method. What distinguishes advanced tools from earlier, less sophisticated tools is their dependence on higher-order basis functions, as compared to the linear functions typical of early tools. In this project Kitware will develop general purpose algorithms to treat with higher-order basis functions. Commercial adaptors to Kitware's open-source VTK, ITK and ParaView products will be licensed to simulation vendors and sold to end-users as commercial plug-ins.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, sup

Kitware announced ParaView 0.6

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware announced today the release of ParaView 0.6, the first public release of their scientific visualization application. ParaView was designed with the need to visualize large data sets in mind. The goals of the ParaView project include the following:

Develop an open-source, multi-platform visualization application.

Support distributed computation models to process large data sets.

Create an open, flexible, and intuitive user interface.

Develop an extensible architecture based on open standards.

ParaView runs on distributed and shared memory parallel as well as single processor systems and has been succesfully tested on Windows, Linux and various Unix workstations and clusters. Under the hood, ParaView uses the Visualization Toolkit as the data processing and rendering engine and has a user interface written using a unique blend of Tcl/Tk and C++. Please see the ParaView web page for detailed informa

NLM Extends and Expands Funding for ITK

Tue, 10 Sep 2002 00:00:00 -0400

The growing success of the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) and the key role played by Kitware as architectural leads has led the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to award an additional year of funding to Kitware. The main activities to be developed include software maintenance, documentation, training and user support.

Project Background: In 1999 The National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in collaboration with partner institutes and agencies NIDCR, NEI, NSF, NIDCD, and NCI (see below for acronyms) awarded a three year, multi-million dollar contract to six groups to develop an open source segmentation and registration toolkit. The groups include GE Research, Kitware, UNC-CH, UPenn, U. of Tennesee (now University of Utah), and MathSoft (now Insightful). (Subcontractors include Harvard Brigham & Women's Hospital, UPenn's GRASP Lab, Columbia University, and the Univ. of Pittsburgh).

For

Kitware Inc. wins a phase II SBIR contract to develop web-based visualization application.

Wed, 10 Jul 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware Inc. has won a department of defense (DOD) small business innovation research (SBIR) phase II contract to develop a web-enabled visualization application. The client-server application will allow analysts to visualize very large data on massively parallel and distributed clusters. The client-user interface will run inside a web browse and will allow secure access to simulation results from desktop or palmtop computers.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including suc

VolView 1.3 Released

Sun, 10 Mar 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware announced today the release of VolView 1.3, a powerful volume rendering system that enables researchers to visualize data from a variety of imaging modalities including CT, MRI, and confocal microscopy. VolView is designed for ease of use, performance, and flexibility at a modest entry price.

New features available in VolView 1.3 include:

More data formats including jpeg, png, GE Signa

Integrated iso-contours in 2D and 3D

Surface area and volume measurements

Support for the VolumePro 1000

Volume filtering including median, threshold, and smoothing

Save volumes and surfaces

Application settings saved across sessions

Improved lightbox with more layout options

Perspective rendering

VolView 1.3 may be downloaded for a free 30-day tri

Kitware Inc. wins a phase I SBIR contract to study web-based visualization

Mon, 21 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware Inc. has won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project to study techniques for visualizing extremely-large high-performance-computing (HPC) data using distributed visualization servers and web-base clients. The research will expand the use of HPC visualization resources by allowing easy and secure access from desktop computers.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, an

Visualizing Arbitrary Basis Functions for Advanced Engineering Analysis and Simulation

Sun, 20 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Inc. has won a Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project to address the lack of visualization technology for advanced engineering simulation tools. Such tools routinely depend on interpolation and approximation (basis) functions for a variety of purposes, including modeling geometry via CAD/CAM tools, or for computational techniques such as the finite element method. What distinguishes advanced tools from earlier, less sophisticated tools is their dependence on higher-order basis functions, as compared to the linear functions typical of early tools.

While modern simulation tools have moved to more sophisticated basis functions, visualization technology has lagged behind. This technology plays a vital role in understanding, communicating and steering computational design, but has not moved beyond supporting linear basis functions, with a few special exceptions (e.g., quadratic). This situation poses a significant problem for engineering computation, since advanced techniques of hig

VTK a Finalist for Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards

Thu, 10 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) was named as a finalist for this year's Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards in a recent announcement made by Software Development magazine.

The forty-nine finalists fall into six categories and were chosen from over 700 nominations by a seasoned team of Software Development editors, expert advisers and columnists. The six categories of tools honored are: Books; Libraries, Frameworks and Components; Languages and Development Environments; Design and Process Tools; Utilities; and Web Sites and Developer Networks. VTK is a finalist in the Libraries, Frameworks and Components category, along with CLX, JRules, JBoss, Microsoft .NET Framework, J2EE, and Qt.

For more information on the Jolt award, please see this Software Development press release.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services

PolyViz: A New Addition To The ActiViz Product Family

Thu, 24 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware has announced a new product focused on embedding geometric data in documents and applications that support ActiveX controls. PolyViz will be released in June 2001 as part of the ActiViz product family of embeddable visualization ActiveX controls.

As an ActiveX control or end-user application, PolyViz can be used without the need for programming or scripting. Simply drop in the control or start the application, load your data, and go! Advanced features of this product provide polygon decimation (decrease the size of your model) and smoothing (improve the look of your model).

ActiViz is a family of software products that allow you to embed active visualization tools into documents and applications that support ActiveX controls. Depending on your requirements, you can use Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk, and embeddable ActiveX controls to extend such applications as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Explorer, and Visual Basic.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providin

Kitware Unveils New Web Site

Sat, 05 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

The Kitware web site, www.kitware.com, has been restructured in order to better support the growing line of products and services that Kitware provides. Customers will find the site easier to navigate, and the seamless integration with the Kitware on-line store makes ordering products simple to do. The most requested information on the Visualization Toolkit has been included directly on the Kitware site, while the link to the existing vtk web pages remains available. In addition, the new Team pages reveal the people behind Kitware.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998,

ActiViz Product Family Introduced

Thu, 01 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware announced today the release of ActiViz/COM and ActiViz/Tcl, the first new products in the ActiViz embeddable visualization product line.

ActiViz is a family of software products that allow you to embed active visualization tools into documents and applications that support ActiveX controls. Depending on your requirements, you can use Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk, and embeddable ActiveX controls to extend such applications as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Explorer, and Visual Basic. Using ActiViz, you can take advantage of the hundreds of imaging, 3D graphics, and visualization filters available in the VTK (Visualization Toolkit) open-source visualization system.

ActiViz/TCL is an embeddable control that lets you use VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) wrapped with Tcl inside of Microsoft documents. You can either load external Tcl scripts, or build the scripts into the application. The Tcl control can be embedded into Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Explorer documents. ActiViz/Tcl 1.1 is avail

Kitware Expands Corporate Offices To Meet Staff Needs

Sat, 24 Feb 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Due to rapid growth, Kitware has expanded corporate offices. While retaining the current address of 469 Clifton Corporate Parkway, in Clifton Park, NY, Kitware has increased office space by approximately 50%. This move was necessary due to the significant increase in Kitware staff over the past year.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing to support top research and development clients around the world; including such prestigious customers as the US National Labs (Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Argonne), the National Institutes of Health,

VolView 1.2 Released

Sun, 10 Dec 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware announced today the release of VolView 1.2, a significant upgrade to the previous VolView 1.1. VolView is a volume rendering system that enables researchers to visualize data from a variety of imaging modalities including CT, MRI, fMRI, and confocal microscopy. VolView is designed for ease of use, performance, and flexibility at a modest entry price.

VolView interfaces to a variety of hardware and software systems, including accelerated OpenGL texturing, the RTViz VolumePro 500 volume rendering engine, and multi-threaded parallel rendering support. VolView also supports a variety of data file formats. This includes standard volume formats such as Analyze, slc, vox, vtk; image formats such as bitmap, pnm, and tiff; basic DICOM; and raw image and volume formats. Other features include maximum intensity projection; alpha compositing; transfer function and material editors; specular and diffuse illumination; cropping and cut plane tools; orthogonal and oblique reformat views; image window, leve

Kitware Signs Contract to Develop Parallel Processing Tools

Fri, 10 Mar 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware was signed a three-year contract with the three National Labs - Los Alamos, Sandia, and Livermore - to develop parallel processing tools for VTK.

The goal of the project is to develop scalable parallel processing tools with an emphasis on distributed memory implementations. The project includes parallel algorithms, infrastructure, I/O, support, and display devices. In addition, some GUI components and end-user applications will be developed. The bulk of the technology developed in this contract will be embedded into the standard VTK open-source distribution.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake buil

Kitware Wins Contract from NLM for Long-Term ITK Maintenance

Wed, 10 Nov 1999 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Inc. has been granted a contract by the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NLM/NIH) to perform ongoing maintenance of the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). This maintenance includes supporting and porting ITK on computing platforms; extending ITK's class structure, performing bug fixes and quality enhancements; and building interfaces from ITK to other systems. ITK is a premiere, open-source system used around the world in medical image analysis.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publication, and software quality process. Kitware is known for its advanced open source software tools such as the widely used Visualization Toolkit (VTK), Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK), and the CMake build management software. Established in 1998, Kitware is rapidly growing

Kitware to provide VTK support for new volume rendering hardware

Tue, 10 Nov 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware Inc. and Mitsubishi are teaming together to provide a new standard in high performance volume rendering. In 1999 Mitsubish will be releasing their new VolumePRO volume rendering hardware. (see 3D Volume Graphics, the next frontier of advanced graphics.) Kitware will be providing full support for this hardware in VTK as well as providing demonstration code and applications. Historically volume rendering has been too slow for practical use on "real world" data such as a medical CT scan. By combining VTK with the VolumePRO board researchers and doctors will be capable of interactive three-dimensional investigations previously out of reach due to performace limitations or the cost of purchasing a supercomputer.

For more information on the VolumePro graphics board, please visit www.rtviz.com.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D grap

Kitware Inc. wins research grant from the Air Force Research Labs

Sun, 10 May 1998 00:00:00 -0400

The Air Force Research Labs located in Alberquerqie New Mexico has awarded Kitware Inc. a SBIR Phase I research grant to develop new algorithms for visualizing data with uncertainty. The data that computers process frequently contains uncertainty. An example of this is in weather forcasting, where a forcast will precict a 70% chance of rain. The 70% is called the uncertainty and in many applications it is ignored sometimes leading to disasterous results. The problem is that very few software systems have been developed to handle data with uncertainty, especially when it comes to visualization algorithms. Kitware's expertise in visualization and object oriented design will be applied to develop new techniques to help people not only see the data, but also any uncertainty associated with it.

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providing products and services in the areas of medical image analysis, visualization and 3D graphics, supercomputing, computer vision, open publicat

Kitware News

VTK 5.10 Now Available

InnerOptic and Kitware to Develop Needle-Guidance System that Targets Hepatic Tumors

Midas 3.2.6 Release Now Available

Kitware to Develop Cosmology Analysis Framework for DOE

Tom Munnecke: Towards a Federal Health Information Space

CMake 2.8.8 is Now Available

Slicer 4.1 Released

Kitware to Improve DOE Knowledgebase System

Kitware to Develop Simulation Workflow for the Department of Energy

Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization (SDAV) Institute

ITK 4.1.0 Released

OSEHRA Announces First Board of Directors

CDash 2.0.2 Now Available

ParaView 3.14 Released

Kitware Introduces Visomics for Bioinformatics

Midas 3.2.2 Now Available

Kitware Announces Debut of KiwiViewer in Android Market

Kitware Welcomes New Team Member in January

Kitware Receives Phase II Funding for the Development of a Computational Chemistry Workbench

Kitware Announces Open-Source Release of VES & KiwiViewer

Kitware Collaborates with NREL on Software Process for Radiance Project

Slicer 4.0.1 is Now Available for Download

Employees Honored for 10 Years of Dedication

New Team Member Joins Kitware in December

CMake 2.8.7 Now Available

ITK 4.0 is Now Available and Ready for Download!

Kitware Receives $181,700 for 3D Slicer Enhancements

Kitware SAS Moves to Support Growth

Wesley Turner Appointed to SPIE Senior Membership

OSEHRA Debuts Weekly Teleconference Tomorrow

ParaView 3.12.0 is Now Available!

Kitware Courses Move to Webinar Format

Kitware Awarded Funding for Robot-Assisted Prostate Surgery Research

Students' VTK Google Summer of Code Projects Completed

Kitware Expands Offices and Workforce

Kitware Welcomes New Team Members in September

ITKv4 Beta Now Available

CMake 2.8.6 Now Available

Kitware Team Grows in September

Kitware Sponsors MICCAI Society Young Scientist Publication Impact Award

Free Online Courses Now Available

VTK 5.8.0 Released

Kitware Awarded $300,000 in NIH Research Grants to Fund Advancements in Biomedical Research

Kitware Announces the Release of KiwiViewer 0.0.2

Kitware Awarded DOE Funding to Develop Climate Change Analysis Tool

Kitware Continues to Grow in August

Kitware Ranks #1572 on the 2011 Inc. 5000 List

KiwiViewer Released in Apple App Store

Kitware Team Grows in July

MIDASDesktop 1.8.2 Released

VolView 3.4 Released

Kitware Continues to Grow in June

Kitware Supports the VA's Open Source EHR

Kitware Authors Contribute to Architecture of Open Source Text

Google Summer of Code Student Projects Announced

Kitware Announces ITK Course in Lyon, France

Kitware Projects and People Recognized for Work with Qt

Visualization Toolkit Selected for Google Summer of Code

Kitware Adds Three Members to the Team in February

NASA Awards Kitware Contract to Develop ParaView for Ultrascale Visualization

ParaView 3.10.0 Now Available

Kitware Receives Tibbetts Award for STTR Program Excellence

CMake 2.8.4 Released

Kitware Continues to Grow

IGSTK 4.4 Released

ActiViz released as free and open-source software

Kitware Honors Employees

Kitware Announces Open Source Course in Lyon, France

CDash 1.8.2 Released

Kitware's Most Popular Books Available on amazon.co.uk

Kitware's Cutting-Edge Research Leads To Record Growth and More Jobs

Kitware Offers Free Access to VolView

Kitware, Leading US Builder of Open Source Technology and Developer of Advanced Research Solutions, Unveils Plans for the RSNA 2010 Conference

Kitware Receives Honors in 2010 HPCwire Readers� and Editors� Choice Awards

Annual HPCwire Awards Demonstrate Achievement of Mindshare from Within the Global HPC Community

Kitware & the NA-MIC Community Announce Alpha Release of 3D Slicer 4.0

ITKv4

Kitware Announces Opening of European Office

Kitware Welcomes Nine New Employees