Paper Info
Title
Embedding VTK and ITK into a visual programming and rapid prototyping platform
Abstract
Visualization and image processing of medical datasets has become an essential task for clinical diagnosis support as well as for treatment planning. In order to enable a physician to use and evaluate algorithms within a clinical setting, easily applicable software prototypes with a dedicated user interface are essential. However, substantial programming knowledge is still required today when using powerful open source libraries such as the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) or the Insight Toolkit (ITK). Moreover, these toolkits provide only limited graphical user interface functionality. In this paper, we present the visual programming and rapid prototyping platform MeVisLab which provides flexible and simple handling of visualization and image processing algorithms of VTK/ITK, Open Inventor and the MeVis Image Library by modular visual programming. No programming knowledge is required to set up image processing and visualization pipelines. Complete applications including user interfaces can be easily built within a general framework. In addition to the VTK/ITK features, MeVisLab provides a full integration of the Open Inventor library and offers a state-of-the-art integrated volume renderer. The integration of VTK/ITK algorithms is performed automatically: an XML structure is created from the toolkits' source code followed by an automatic module generation from this X-AIL description. Thus, MeVisLab,rating VTK/ITK as modules and is suited for rapid prototyping as well as for offers a one stop solution integrating VTK/ITK as modules and is suited for rapid prototyoing as well as for teaching medical visualization and image analysis. The VTK/ITK integration is available as package of the free version of MeVisLab.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1117/12.652102
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
VTK,ITK,open inventor,visual programming,visualization,image processing
Engineering drawing,XML,Computer science,Source code,Visualization,Visual programming language,Software,Graphical user interface,User interface,Computer programming
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
6141
0277-786X
15
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.99
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
matthias koenig1181.51
Wolf Spindler27110.97
Jan Rexilius38514.46
Julien Jomier423719.59
Florian Link5353.78
Heinz-otto Peitgen61030114.91