2011 Project Week Breakout Session: Slicer4

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Summer Project Week Breakout Session: Slicer4 Module Usability

9am-11am, Tuesday June 21, 2011, Star room.

Attendees:

All Slicer4 developers.

Reference Material:

• Slicer4

Preliminary Agenda:

Purpose: Review of existing slicer4 functionality and user interface with an eye towards creating a consistent and pleasant user experience with a logical grouping of functions to accomplish standard tasks.

UI

• Review of features and next steps with the idea that developers and users can vote on priorities for development effort
  • Main application GUI: compare Slicer 3 and Slicer 4
    • Reorganizing panels above both the slice viewers and 3d viewers for consistent look and feel.
  • Review keybindings and mouse behavior
    • Compare Slicer 3 and Slicer 4
    • Identify inconsistencies
  • I/O
    • Load/Save: Default is the scene, which includes sceneviews. Everything else is under advanced
    • Import/Export: to and from Dicom
  • Module template: Help, Acknowledgements, location of I/O panel, behavior of "frames" such as auto-stretch.
  • Current List of Core modules: should they stay or should they move into other categories? Add new ones? Order?
    • Annotation Module (xx)
    • Color Module (xx)
    • Data Module (xx)
    • Interactive Editor (Steve Pieper)
    • Sceneviews (xx)
    • Slice Controls Module: Should present controls for: Slice viewers, compare viewers, 3D viewers: rename to Layout controler?
    • Slicer Welcome Module: update?
    • Volume Rendering Module: I/O should have same user experience as I/O in Slice viewers
    • Volumes Module (xx)
    • Transforms Module (xx)

Infrastructure discussions

• • instrumenting dimensions for sliders, seeds etc.: Slicer users have data with a wide range of dimensions. E.g. Mouse DTI versus Human DTI: need different defaults. This is currently not working well.
  • Remote IO options (save/restore of slicer data and scenes via DICOM, Midas, wiki...): Use a zip ball with a Dicom header and some thumbnails?
  • Performance enhancements/bottlenecks
  • Documentation
  • Enhancements to module functionality
    • command line modules (slicer execution model)
    • extensions
    • python scripting
  • Embedding slicer4 packages in standard python interpreter
  • Support for new datatypes?
    • Icon associated with each datatype
    • I/O registration in qSlicer[Core]IOManager
    • Official module for each node type "Edit properties..." (current hack)

DTI needs different defaults than human DTI, for instance.

• • web/mobile deployment options?
  • other ideas or requests?

General Slicer4 TODO items for discussion among developers

• Porting remaining SWidgets (Crosshairs, Model/Slice Intersections, Reformat Widget...)
• Removing slicer3 legacy code from slicer4 repository
• What modules from the core should become extensions?