ITK and ANALYZE: a synergistic integration

Abstract

The Insight Toolkit (ITK) is a C++ open-source software toolkit developed under sponsorship of the National Library of Medicine. It provides advanced algorithms for performing image registration and segmentation, but does not provide support for visualization and analysis, nor does it offer any graphical user interface (GUI). The purpose of this integration project is to make ITK readily accessible to end-users with little or no programming skills, and provide interactive processing, visualization and measurement capabilities. This is achieved through the integration of ITK with ANALYZE, a multi-dimension image visualization/analysis application installed in over 300 institutions around the world, with a user-base in excess of 4000. This integration is carried out at both the software foundation and GUI levels. The foundation technology upon which ANALYZE is built is a comprehensive C-function library called AVW. A new set of AVW-ITK functions have been developed and integrated into the AVW library, and four new ITK modules have been added to the ANALYZE interface. Since ITK is a software developer’s toolkit, the only way to access its intrinsic power is to write programs that incorporate it. Integrating ITK with ANALYZE opens the ITK algorithms to end-users who otherwise might never be able to take advantage of the toolkit’s advanced functionality. In addition, this integration provides end-to-end interactive problem solving capabilities which allow all users, including programmers, an integrated system to readily display and quantitatively evaluate the results from the segmentation and registration routines in ITK, regardless of the type or format of input images, which are comprehensively supported in ANALYZE.