VTK 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

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

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 Recognized in 2011 HPCwire Readers' and Editors' Choice Awards

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

Kitware has been recognized in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editor’s Choice Awards, recently presented at the 2011 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC ‘11), in Seattle, Washington.

Recognized in the Editors' Choice category, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) received the award for best HPC visualization product or technology. HPCwire also recognized Kitware’s ParaView, an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application, in 2010 with both the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards.

The HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through online polling of the global HPCwire audience, while the Editors’ Choice Awards are selected by a panel of HPCwire editors and industry leaders. Both awards are announced annually at the Supercomputing Conference.

"HPCwire readers are regarded as amongst the most discerning in the HPC community, and these awards represent w

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

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 Books on Amazon in France and Germany

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

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

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 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 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

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

Cmake 2.8.5 Released

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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

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 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 & 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

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

VTK 5.6.1 Released

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of VTK 5.6.1, a patch release over 5.6.0 with a small set of improvements.

VTK now includes NetCDF 4.1.1 allowing users to take advantage of the latest enhancements to NetCDF. Additionally, the C++ version of the library is also included. A new file format, MPAS, has been added; it is a netcdf-based reader for ocean and atmosphere datasets.

Charts have significant improvements in axes layout and the ability to display multiple data series (up to four) in the same plot. Initial support for linked selection has been added to the charts in VTK and ParaView. Support for alpha blending in parallel coordinate plots has also been added.

We've cleaned up VTK's build and install rules so that developers don't have to worry about 'rpath' anymore.

Additionally, "make install" has been vastly improved on all platforms.

As always, we value your feedback. Please report any issues on the

ParaView 3.8.1 Released

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Kitware is pleased to announce the release of ParaView 3.8.1, a patch release over 3.8.0 with a small set of improvements.

ParaView now comes HDF5 1.8.5. This enables developers to easily create readers and plugins for ParaView that use newer versions of HDF5. We are now including the C++ and the high level (hl) versions of the library for those who wish to use their newer API.

Among the improvements are two new file formats. The first is a netcdf based reader for MPAS format ocean and atmosphere datasets. The second, available in source form only, is a reader plugin that allows ParaView to read multi-resolution wavelet compressed VAPOR data format files. Thanks to John Clyne and Dan Legreca for contributing the VAPOR plugin.

We have improved the support for animation scripting through Python. The new API is more coherent with the rest of the ParaView Python API, avoiding the need for script writers to know minute details regarding how to create animations using proxies. Tracing cap

ParaView 3.8.1 RC 1 Binaries Now Available

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

The ParaView team is pleased to announce the availability of the ParaView 3.8.1 Release Candidate 1 binaries for download on the ParaView download page. Final binaries should follow shortly.

Release Notes:

ParaView 3.8.1 is a patch release over 3.8.0 with a a small set of improvements. The following are some noteworthy improvements and fixes.

ParaView now comes HDF5 1.8.5. This enables developers to create readers/plugins for ParaView that use newer versions of HDF5 easily. Also we are now including the C++ and the high level (hl) versions of the libraryfor those who wish to use their newer API.

Among the improvements are two new file formats. The first is a netcdf based reader for MPAS format ocean and atmosphere data sets. The second, available in source form only is a reader plugin that allows ParaView to read multi-resolution wavelet compressed VAPOR data format files. Thanks to John Clyn

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

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

ITK 3.18 Now Available for Ubuntu 10.04

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Thanks to Dr. Paul Novotny ITK 3.18 is now available for Ubuntu 10.04. Ubuntu 10.04 (codenamed the Lucid Lynx) is the latest release of the Ubuntu operating system. As always this Ubuntu packaging includes the WrapITK module for using ITK with Python.

Currently, Dr. Novotny creates his own test packages and the developers of the Vascular Modeling Toolkit (vmtk.org) who are one of his largest user bases of ITK/Ubuntu packages help test the software. Kitware would like to thank Dr. Novotny for his work on this package. Such volunteer acts allow our toolkits to be more easily adopted by a broad set of users, and we are greatly appreciative of these types of efforts.

If you are interested in installing the ITK 3.18 Ubuntu package please visit: http://paulnovo.org/repository. If you are interested in helping Dr. Novotny test ITK

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

ITK 3.18 Now Available

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

ITK 3.18 is now available for download. The main changes in this release include:

Improvements in implementation of mathematical traits, particularly for fast rounding, contributed by Brad Lowenkamp and Tom Vercauteren.
Addition of classes for managing internationalization of strings, contributed by Tom Vercauteren.
Updated the version of NrrdIO library in Utilities, thanks to Gordon Kindlmann and Michel Audette.
Fixed shadowing warnings reported by gcc.
Recently added classes were included in the Wrapping, thanks to Gaetan Lehmann.
Improved support for Symmetric Tensor operations, thanks to Luke Bloy.
Improved behavior of the Object Factories, thanks to Brad Lowenkamp.
Improved testing for Discrete Gaussian derivative fi

VTK 5.6

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

Kitware is planning to release VTK 5.6 this spring. Since the previous release, 270 new C++ classes have been added. The new features in VTK include improved support for line charts and bar charts that don't depend on Qt. With this release VTK provides a new text analysis module. Another major improvement is support for parallel rendering.

This release also includes changes that improve performance. VTK can now locate and insert non-uniformly distributed points three times faster than the previous version.

We've improved GPU support in VTK. The vtkGPUVolumeRayCastMapper has been migrated from VTKEdge to VTK. VTK 5.6 contains a GPU-based real time Line Integral Convolution (LIC) with enhanced image contrast and LIC + geometry compositing for dense vector field / flow visualization. These are just the highlights. For a complete list of changes, visit the VTK Wiki and search "VTK 5.6 Release Planning."

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

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

ParaView 3.6.2 Now Available

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Kitware, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Lab are proud to announce the release of ParaView 3.6.2. The binaries and sources are available for download from the ParaView website. ParaView 3.6.2 contains the following new features and improvements:

The Python interface has been revamped, an exciting new extension to the Paraview Python interface is Python trace. The goal of trace is to generate human readable, not overly verbose, Python scripts that mimic a user's actions in the GUI. See the "Python Trace" article on page 6 of the October 2009 Kitware Source for more details.

ParaView 3.6.2 includes a collection of statistics algorithms. You can compute descriptive statistics (mean, variance, min, max, skewness, kurtosis), compute contingency tables, perform k-means analysis, examine correlations between arrays, and perform principal component analysis on arrays. More in

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<

ITK 3.16 is Now Available

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

ITK is an open-source, cross-platform system that provides developers with an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis. ITK is distributed under an OSI-Approved BSD License and has been developed using the same software engineering tools as VTK (e.g., cmake, dashboards, doxygen). ITK provides leading-edge algorithms for registering and segmenting multidimensional data. Additionally, methods exist in the InsightApplications repository for connecting ITK and VTK pipelines together.

The ITK development team released the latest version, 3.16, on September 15, 2009. ITK 3.16 is now available for download. More details about this release can be found in the official release announcment, or by going to the

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

VTK 5.4.2 Released

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The VTK 5.4.2 patch was released on June 4, 2009; this release is now available for download from the VTK website. A full list of changes is available through the VTK user's mailing list archives. Included in this release are the following:

GUISupport/Qt/QVTKWidget.cxx: Instead of deleting timers immediately, mark them for deletion next time the event loop is entered.
Hybrid/vtkAxesActor.cxx: When a user transform is applied to vtkAxesActor, make sure the axis labels are translated with the axes
Infovis/vtkCommunity2DLayoutStrategy.cxx: Fix a memory leak
IO/vtkFLUENTReader.cxx: Bug fixes courtesy of Terry Jordan.

The first set of changes is necessary because for some reason this reader never supplied ParaView with its number of cells.

The second set of changes is necessary because it seems that we've either encountered

VTK 5.4 Released

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

VTK 5.4 was released on March 26, 2009; this release is now available for download from the VTK website. A full list of changes is available through the VTK user’s mailing list archives. The major changes in this release are as follows:

The freetype font engine was updated to v2.3.7
Two new views were added: TreeRingView & IcicleView
The Geovis kit is now included with VTK

More information about VTK 5.4 can be found on vtk.org.

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

VTK 5.2.1 Released

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The VTK 5.2.1 patch release is now available for download from the VTK web site. A full list of changes from 5.2.0 to 5.2.1 is available through the VTK user’s mailing list archives.

The VTK 5.4 release is slated for Summer 2009. To find out about the new features being implemented in VTK 5.4, visit the VTK Wiki and search for “VTK 5.4 Release Planning”.

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.

InfoVis and Earth Kit

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

The Titan project with Sandia National Laboratories is focused on building informatics capabilities into VTK. There is now a mostly functional charting library in VTK based on Qt, which supports line, bar and stacked charts. We are working with Doug Gregor from Indiana University to integrate distributed-memory graph algorithms into VTK, and we are also integrating with Sandia's multi-threaded graph library. Current work on the geospatial view includes 2D projections, multi-texturing, and dynamic labeling. Many informatics filters and views have been made into in ParaView plug-ins which will soon be part of the ParaView repository, along with a new informatics-centric client called OverView.

One of the needs at Sandia is VTK interoperability with Matlab. To use Matlab code from VTK, we are developing a Matlab programmable filter for VTK, which can execute arbitrary Matlab code. To use VTK from Matlab, we are combining Matlab's extensive Java support with VTK's Java wrappers. While being developed w

ARL Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Contract

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

For the past two years Kitware has had funding from the Army Research Labs to explore the use of GPU (Graphics Processing Units) for visualization. This was an STTR in collaboration with University of Maryland, College Park. One of the outcomes of this funding was the birth of VTKEdge. Fueled by contributions from several other projects and funding sources, VTKEdge is now blooming into a collection of tools for improved visualization. All of the components that we talk about here have made it into VTKEdge.

We’ve developed a framework for incorporating GLSL or CUDA-based algorithms into VTK. A collection of classes that abstracts the OpenGL data structures for transferring data to and from GPU memory are provided. Using this infrastructure, writing new algorithms that exploit the parallelism provide

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.

VTK 5.2 Released

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

VTK 5.2 is the first major release of VTK since 5.0 was released in January 2006. This release includes:

The new Infovis kit for processing and visualizing “information”(non-geometric) data
The new Views kit to combine groups of filters, visualization techniques, interaction, and selection mechanisms into a render window to view data
A new Widgets architecture and more than a dozen new 3D widgets Improved time support
Improved multi-block / composite data support
Improved Java wrapping
Improved Mac OS X support
New Utilities: freerange, verdict, libxml2, metaio, sqlite
Updated Utilities: freetype, zlib
More than 300 new C++ classes since VTK 5.0
More than 100 new C++ tests since VTK 5.0

Multi-block Support in ParaView

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

One of the major targets for ParaView 3.4 is to support composite datasets natively. As a starting point, Kitware has restructured the composite dataset hierarchy to make it more use-case driven and easy to understand than before. Composite datasets now support a full tree data structure, instead of the table-of-tables approach used earlier. Composite data iterators are now more powerful in that they can be used to not only access datasets in a composite dataset, but also initialize/set them. This makes is possible for filters to work with iterators directly without having to downcast to a concrete subclass as was the case earlier.

The ParaView GUI is also undergoing major overhaul to support the users' need to explore the composite data tree. Filters dealing with composite data sets such as ExtractBlock, ExtractLevel, ExtractDataSet now show the entire composite dataset tree on the client making it possible for users to choose the nodes that they are interested in directly using the GUI. Similarly

Titan Informatics Toolkit Update

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Titan Informatics Toolkit is an information visualization library which began in 2006 through a contract with Sandia National Labs. The toolkit is deployed as a number of new filters and views in VTK that work with the new graph, tree, and table data types.

Recently, Kitware has refactored the graph data structures to have a new iterator-based interface, as well as created a simpler graph implementation and more useful class hierarchy. Thanks to an adapter to the Boost Graph Library, Kitware has been able to use the rich set of algorithms in the BGL to implement several VTK filters. The upcoming VTK 5.2 release will be the first to contain these new information visualization capabilities.

Currently Kitware is working on distributed graph data structures and algorithms with Sandia National Laboratories and Indiana University and is also creating general-purpose interactive Qt-based charting capabilities.

Earth Kit is an open-source geospatial visualization library created through a contract with Sandia National Labs. Earth Kit is part of the new VTK view/representation architecture. This new architecture enables geographic visualizations to be easily integrated into applications that also have other visualization components. For example, an analyst may be interested in visualizing a network consisting of individuals and events. The Titan Informatics Toolkit's "graph layout" view may be used in conjunction with an "Earth" view in order to visualize the network in different ways. The view selections will be linked, making it easy to correlate information in both views.

Earth Kit is being used as part a prototype application being put together by the Computer Vision group to display video and tracks superimposed on the Earth. The work on this project began in the summer of 2007.

"A modular extensible visualization system architecture for culled prioritized data streaming" published in The Proceedings of SPIE Volume 6495, Ahrens et. al describe extensions to VTK that improve upon its support for streaming. The new techniques include discarding pieces of the input dataset that do not contribute to the final visualization and prioritizing those that do. With prioritization, the most important p

VTK Patch Release

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The VTK 5.0.4 patch release was announced on January 22, 2008. Changes from 5.0.3 to 5.0.4 are listed below. We are planning to create the VTK-5-2 branch in CVS soon in preparation for the (upcoming) release of VTK 5.2.

XML precision fix
Suppress deprecation warnings when using cl with Unix Makefiles generator
Java weak reference issue
Use vtkIdType instead of int for correct 64-bit id builds
Fixed and simplified vtkOpenGLExtensionManager and updated OpenGL header files
Remove legacy include of GL/glaux.h
Add static method VTKTypeID and merge long long bug fix in vtkTypeTraits.h
Fix incorrect file names in the vtk*Kit.cmake files
Replace MPProcessors() for better Mac OSX 64-bit compatibility
Selected Utilities/kwsys/SystemTools.cxx fixes for KWWidgets file browser dialog
Fix problems when multiple observers invoke further events recursively on the same object

VTK 5.0.4 Patch Release

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The VTK 5.0.4 patch release was announced on January 22, 2008. Changes from 5.0.3 to 5.0.4 are listed below. We are planning to create the VTK-5-2 branch in CVS very soon in preparation for the (upcoming) first release of VTK 5.2. It should be branched within the next week or two with the release to follow soon after that.

*changes from 5.0.3 to 5.0.4:*

XML precision fix
Suppress deprecation warnings when using cl with Unix Makefiles generator
Java weak reference issue
Fix bug 5341: Use vtkIdType instead of int for correct 64-bit id builds
Fixed and simplified vtkOpenGLExtensionManager and updated OpenGL header files
Remove legacy include of GL/glaux.h
Add static method VTKTypeID and merge long long bug fix in vtkTypeTraits.h
Fix incorrect file names in the vtk*Kit.cmake files
Fix bug 5590: No relative path exists between two different Windows drive letters
Fix bug 3331: Replace MPProcessors

VTK 5.0.3 Released

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:00:00 -0400

VTK 5.0.3 was released March 30, 2007. This is the third patch release to VTK 5.0. To download this release, visit http://www.vtk.org/get-software.php. Some of the changes in this release include the following:

• More changes to make the code consistent with the VTK User's Guide and textbook
• Fix vtkMergeDataObjectFilter number of input ports.
• Fix vtkGreedyTerrainDecimation - avoid stack overflow by limiting recursion depth.
• Improve numerical precision in cubic solver.
• Fixed problem when revision string does not end with a space
• Fixed problem where Discrete/Marching Cubes was not considering the whole extent of the input
• Always set VTK_WRAP_HINTS in the vtkLocal example.
• Skip cxx feature test on gcc 2.95.
• Remove the Utilities/vtkmpeg2encode directory from the VTK source tree. (No patented code allowed.)
• TclTk changes - ensure VTK_TK_INTERN

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

• 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.

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.

VTK 5.0 Released

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 00:00:00 -0500

VTK 5.0 was released in January 2006. This is a major release with significant changes from the previous version. Highlights include the following:

• The execution pipeline was overhauled, as described in the "VTK 5.0 Pipeline Architecture" article included in this newsletter.
• A higher-order adaptor framework was developed.
• Support for hierarchical data sets was added, including AMR and multi-block data sets.
• With the expiration of the Marching Cubes patent, the Patented kit has been removed and the Marching Cubes classes have been integrated in the Graphics kit.
• New interpolators have been added (including quaternions).
• Volume rendering performance for vtkImageData has been improved with the addition of space leaping.
• Unstructured grid volume rendering has been added.
• Support for animation was added.

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.

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).

Kitware, Inc. is a leading software development company providin

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 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.