Collaboration/VMTK

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Key Investigators

• Mario Negri Institute: Luca Antiga
• GE: Dan Blezek

Objective

Integration of vmtk (vmtk.sourceforge.net) into Slicer3 (ground work already done in SLC).

• solve last issues with consistency of reference systems and generate a bunch of vmtk CLI modules
• exploit Python in Slicer3

Approaches and Challenges

A few issues still exist, mainly associated with the fact that vmtk is vtk based, and thus it is not MRML aware. Problems are described here. Solving coordinate system consistency issues will benefit from the interaction with the MRML scenes for the Execution model project.

Following the recent introduction of Python in Slicer3, it is in principle possible to use vmtk directly from Slicer's Python shell. This is would be a nice alternative to calling vmtk from the command line (vmtk is primarily a Python module) as it would save I/O operations. The idea is to create a general Python Execution module. A Python class would be required to have

• a method that spits out the description of the instance variables to be exposed on the GUI, the CLI module way (in this case, instance variables could be wrapped vtk objects or wrapped MRML nodes)
• a standard method (e.g. Execute()) that runs the class main functionality

Slicer would take care of building the GUI and setting the state of the object on the basis of the XML description before calling Execute.

Progress

June 2007 Project Week

Automated generation of Slicer3 CLI modules from vmtk command line pipes has been set up, and a few example modules have been generated.

January 2007 Project Half Week