Engineering:GE

Overview (PI: Jim Miller)

GE is adding technology to ITK to support the needs of NA-MIC, developing a module plugin and scheduling architecture for Slicer3, developing a registration architecture, developing standard radiological review modes, and providing DICOM support for diffusion imaging.

GE Research Projects

	Insight Toolkit (ITK) The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) is an open-source software toolkit for performing registration and segmentation. ITK is used as the principal library for image analysis and general image IO in the 3D Slicer. GE Research has extended ITK to support NA-MIC activities by providing probability distributions, tensor pixels, and displacement transforms.
	Slicer3 Plugin Architecture The 3D Slicer platform has been completely reworked through the joint efforts of the NA-MIC community and the BIRN, NAC, NCIGT, and other cooperative grants that leverage the common infrastructure. GE Research has created a simple plugin architecture that allows researchers to extend Slicer3's capabilities with plugins provided as executables, shared libraries, or python modules. See here for more information. We have recently extended the execution model to include nonlinear transformations (BSpline and Displacement Vectors). We have also revamped the Slicer3 build and installation configurations to allow plugins to be built outside of a Slicer build. See here and here for more information on building plugins outside of Slicer3.
	Registration Architecture A fundamental technology in Slicer is the scene graph or MRML scene used to describe the relationships between various sources of primary and derived data and annotation. Relating images from longitudinal or cross-sectional studies requires estimating the transformation between the image sets, known as registration. GE Research is providing an infrastructure for registration inside of Slicer3, leveraging existing registration algorithms from ITK. The architecture includes IO mechanisms from transforms from files and plugins, transform representations in MRML, visualization through transforms, and managing the differences in coordinate frames between Slicer3 and ITK (see here and here.
	Radiological Review Modes
[[Image: |200px|]]	DICOM Support for Diffusion Imaging
[[Image: |200px|]]	Robust MRI Measurement Tools Funded through the NCBC collaboration grant mechanism, this project brings together researchers from UNC, UPenn, and GE Research to develop deformable registration and MS lesion segmentation tools.