November 1999

Kitware signs three-year contract with US National Library of Medicine to develop open source segmentation & registration toolkit

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 (the "N" for nation in this case being the USA, see below for acronym definitions) has 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, and MathSoft. (Subcontractors include Harvard Brigham & Women's Hospital, UPenn's GRASP Lab, Columbia University, and the Univ. of Pittsburgh).

The goal of the project is to design an OO system with a breadth of algorithms and data structures to support manual, semi-automatic, and automatic registration and segmentation (with a focus on 3D). While early versions of the software will be focused on the Visible Human datasets from NLM, the toolkit is to be designed as general as possible for future applications. The hope is that at the end of the three years the toolkit will continue with a life of its own (similar to the VTK community).

What makes this really interesting for VTK users is that the lead architects of the toolkit include the VTK folks (at GE and Kitware), and it looks like (no guarantees at this point) the architecture will be quite similar to VTK - certainly we will make sure VTK works VERY well with this toolkit. Also, open source software has gained a significant boost with sponsorship from a prestigious organization like NLM.

If you're interested in knowing more, you'll want to contact Terry Yoo at NLM (yoo@nlm.nih.gov). And for those of you looking to download the code - the first release probably won't be ready for at least 1.5 to 2 years, and maybe longer.

(Acronyms:
NIDCR = National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research
NEI = National Eye Insitute
NSF = National Science Foundation
NIDCD = National Institute for Deafness and other Communication Disorders
NCI = National Cancer Institute)

Kitware, Inc. is a small, privately held company offering consulting, products, and services in the areas of 3D graphics, visualization, image processing, and volume rendering. Kitware provides support and training for the widely used Visualization Toolkit system. Kitware is also developing other open source and proprietary software including the National Library of Medicine Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit. Kitware is located in the Tech Valley region of New York State.