Ubuntu Manpage: insighttoolkit - imaging toolkit for segmentation and registration

Provided by: libinsighttoolkit5-dev_5.4.0-2_amd64

NAME

       insighttoolkit - imaging toolkit for segmentation and registration

DESCRIPTION

This manual page briefly documents the Insight Toolkit (ITK).

ITK is an open-source software toolkit for performing registration and segmentation. Segmentation is the
process of identifying and classifying data found in a digitally sampled representation. Typically the
sampled representation is an image acquired from such medical instrumentation as CT or MRI scanners.
Registration is the task of aligning or developing correspondences between data. For example, in the
medical environment, a CT scan may be aligned with a MRI scan in order to combine the information
contained in both.

ITK is implemented in C++. In addition, an automated wrapping process generates interfaces between C++
and interpreted programming languages such as Tcl, Java, and Python. This enables developers to create
software using a variety of programming languages. ITK's C++ implementation style is referred to as
generic programming. Such C++ templating means that the code is highly efficient, and that the many
software problems are discovered at compile-time, rather than at run-time during program execution.

Because ITK is an open-source project, developers from around the world can use, debug, maintain, and
extend the software. ITK uses a model of software development referred to as Extreme Programming. Extreme
Programming collapses the usual software creation methodology into a simultaneous and iterative process
of design-implement-test-release. The key features of Extreme Programming are communication and testing.
Communication among the members of the ITK community is what helps manage the rapid evolution of the
software. Testing is what keeps the software stable. In ITK, an extensive testing process is in place
that measures the quality on a daily basis.

HISTORY

       In 1999 the US  National  Library  of  Medicine  [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/nlmhome.html]  of  the  National
       Institutes  of  Health  awarded  a  three-year  contract  to  develop  an  open-source  registration  and
       segmentation toolkit, which eventually came to be known as the Insight Toolkit (ITK). The primary purpose
       of      the      project      is       to       support       the       Visible       Human       Project
       [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html]  by  providing software tools to process and
       work with the project data. ITK's NLM Project Manager was Dr. Terry Yoo, who coordinated  the  six  prime
       contractors  who  made  up the Insight consortium. These consortium members included the three commercial
       partners GE Corporate R&D, Kitware, Inc., and MathSoft (the company name  is  now  Insightful);  and  the
       three  academic partners University of North Carolina (UNC), University of Tennessee (UT), and University
       of Pennsylvania (UPenn).  The  Principle  Investigators  for  these  partners  were,  respectively,  Bill
       Lorensen  at  GE  CRD, Will Schroeder at Kitware, Vikram Chalana at Insightful, Stephen Aylward with Luis
       Ibanez at UNC (Luis is now at Kitware), Ross Whitaker with Josh Cates at  UT  (both  now  at  Utah),  and
       Dimitri  Metaxas at UPenn. In addition, several subcontractors rounded out the consortium including Peter
       Raitu at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Celina Imielinska and Pat Molholt at Columbia University, Jim Gee at
       UPenn's Grasp Lab, and George Stetton at University of Pittsburgh.

LICENSE

       ITK is released under a BSD-style license.   See  /usr/share/doc/libinsighttoolkitX.Y/copyright  for  the
       full text.

API REFERENCE

       The API documentation is available in HTML generated by Doxygen, in the insighttoolkit-doc package.

MAILING LIST

       Join the community by subscribing to the ITK mailing lists at http://www.itk.org/HTML/MailingLists.htm.

AUTHORS

       The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit is developed by the Insight Software Consortium and the
       ITK community.