September 2002

Kitware's relationship with the US National Library of Medicine to develop the open source segmentation & registration toolkit (ITK) is extended and expanded for an additional year.

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 more information, contact Terry Yoo at NLM (yoo@nlm.nih.gov). The software source code (Release 1.0) is now available from www.itk.org.

(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.