SCI Research: ITK - Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute

ITK

The Insight Toolkit (ITK) is an open source, freely available, object-oriented software package for medical image processing, segmentation, and registration. ITK was developed by a world-wide consortium of academic and industry partners and employs leading-edge algorithms in two, three, and higher dimensions. ITK was was funded by the US National Library Of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health to facilitate analysis of the Visible Human Project data sets. Methods in the toolkit are applicable to a wide variety of clinic data such as CT, MRI, ultrasound, PET, fluoroscopy and microscopy.

The Insight Software Consortium has met its primary goals for the creation of an archival vehicle for image processing algorithms and an established functioning platform to accelerate new research efforts. Insight Toolkit release 1.4 incorporates software from new contributors including Harvard Medical School and the Georgetown ISIS Center. ITK 1.4 has also been integrated with applications for medical and scientific supercomputing visualization, such as Analyze from the Mayo Clinic and SCIRun from the University of Utah's SCI Institute.

The most aggressive hope for this project has been the creation of a self-sustaining open-source software development community in medical image processing. With the creation of an open repository built from common principles, we hope to help focus and concentrate research in this field, reduce redundancy of development, and promote cross-institution communication. The long-term impact of this initiative may well reach beyond the initial mission of archiving computer algorithms.

There is growing evidence that ITK is beginning to influence the international research community. User and developer mailing lists include over 300 members in more than 30 countries. Applications employing ITK software have begun to diversify, including work in liver RF ablation surgical planning, vascular segmentation, live-donor hepatic transplant analysis, intra-operative 3D registration for image-guided intervention, rapid analysis of neurological function in veterans, longitudinal studies of Alzheimer's patients using MRI, and even handwriting analysis. The Insight Toolkit project is emerging as a clear success and a significant and permanent contribution to the field of medical imaging.

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