2009 Winter Project Week Slicer VMTK

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Key Investigators

• Daniel Haehn (Student of Medical Informatics, University of Heidelberg)
• Luca Antiga (Medical Imaging Unit, Biomedical Engineering Department, Mario Negri Institute)
• Ron

Objective

The Vascular Modeling Toolkit (VMTK) is a collection of libraries and tools for 3D reconstruction, geometric analysis, mesh generation and surface data analysis for image-based modeling of blood vessels. It should be very interesting to offer such techniques in Slicer3.

Approach, Plan

VMTK provides Python pipeable scripts (PypeS) to connect various commands and/or scripts. An automated mechanism to generate non-interactive Slicer modules has already been implemented.

The plan is to write a python scripted module for Slicer3 that connects to VMTK pipes and provides the same user interaction style found in VMTK. This is necessary for interactive segmentation.

In addition, a collection of non-interactive modules relevant to segmentation and characterization of vascular networks will be generated.

Finally, Slicer-vmtk packaging issues will be tackled.

Progress

An interactive python module
skeleton has been created. Through
a workaround the VMTK classes are
already accessible in Slicer through a
compiled library. Since
now techniques like observers and
callbacks are available in Slicer-Python
we could add the first algorithm of VMTK
to slicer: Fast Marching Initialization.

The VMTK Skeleton module was uploaded to
the NA-MIC Sandbox (/SlicerVMTK) and can be
also seen as the first example to use observers
and callbacks in interactive python modules.