EngineeringRetreat2010

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Goals: Develop clarity and a plan for this year's work; establish broader strategic vision for the next four NAMIC years.

Logistics

• When: November 17-18 (Wednesday and Thursday). Start time: noon Wednesday, end time: early afternoon Thursday
• Where: Boston SPL, 1249 Facility
• Who: Engineering Core leaders and key personnel

Strategy

• Slicer 3.6.x is in maintenance mode.
• New development efforts are targeted at Slicer 4.
• Communication with "Customers" is a top priority.
  • For developers: stabilize the Slicer environment. Slicer has been a moving target for too long.
  • For end-users: simplify the user interface, streamline and simplify common workflows
  • Support the development of solutions
  • We are not in the "early adopter game" for the next two years

Short term goals

• Targeted for AHM
• Assign owners for each bullet item on this list
• Rons number 1: Augment scenes and scenesnapshots (see also its counterpart, the Image Database UI)
  • Thumbnails: user selectable toggle: 3d viewer (default), whole frame, red slice viewer, ability to replace thumbnails
  • Annotation: User-provided description of scenesnapshot/scene (Daniel Haehn)
• Rons number 2: Make load/save easier to understand for new users.
  • Single interface to all data sources based on QSlicerVolumesIODialog.
  • Plan and implement minimalist UI design for load
• Rons number 3: Review Slicer3 bug tracker for issues and feature requests - in UI, particular widgets, command line modules, improved transforms/registration... (Steve)
• Rons number 4: Keep Slicer4 Qt port on schedule (JF, JC)
• Rons number 5: VTK Widgets Roadmap (Will)
• Scene module: A new module to organize scenes and scenesnapshots
• Update Wiki pages:
  • CMAKE superbuild with support for extensions (Service Core)
  • Slicer4
  • Slicer4:Developers

Longer Term Goals

• DICOM read and write (local and remote) via CTK
• extended save: save to local and remote destinations. Make plans for logic components, DB transaction, and UI design.
• Organizing multiple data sets from one subject: time series, image fusion etc.
• Packaging/Superbuild fixes
  • Package for linux
  • Windows - clean registry on uninstall
  • Mac - .dmg into application folder
• Creation of a Display Module
• Make plans for a new and improved Editor for slicer4
  • Grow Cuts, RSS and fast Marching with volume cropping, integral volume rendering, (limited) GPU acceleration
• Investigate use of a binary mask used with volume rendering to specify non-rectilinear ROIs, to display segmentation results, and to display effects of interactive editing
• Define a "Core" Slicer that can be distributed with InsightApplications repository of ITKv4
  • Review Slicer application framework to support modularization and customization
  • Two audiences:
    • Create new GUI infrastructure where a simple Interface is created for each application area, e.g. one GUI for Radiologists reading brain MRI, another one for torso CT, ...
    • Simple, Extensible Platform for Developers (for custom apps/interfaces).
• Switch to GIT deferred. Reconsider after the first stable release of Slicer 4.
• Switch to client/server dashboards and take advantage of its benefits
  • Each night binaries copied from client machines to Dashboard page/database that manages them
  • Ensures Dashboards, builds, releases using common tags/svn#s
  • Ensures available binaries include last-successful build, last-release build, and last-nights build.
  • Dashboard specifies what should be build on what clients ("CDash@home" or "Client/Server CDash")
• GUI Testing
  • There is now an open-source method for automated testing of Qt-based applications: http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Testing_design
• Support scenes containing data that spans multiple scales in time and space
  • visualize, indicate correspondence and support interactions with a scene in which the data differ by orders of magnitude and change over time
• Infrastructure that supports simultaneous GPU-based volume rendering and GPU-based interactive segmentation methods (vtkWidgets)
• Guidelines and examples for GPU-based algorithms
• Interactive/iterative command-line modules (e.g., tied to a vtkWidget)
• Determine an alternative to Mantis/bug-tracking. We have over 495 bugs.
• Batch processing (IPython) examples
  • includes an algorithm validation framework
• Interact with ITKv4 (once released?), CTK, NiPy, and other like-minded projects.
• Consider ITKv4 module management tools being developed (after they have been released as stable release)
  • Documentation prior to code development
  • Module-specific dashboards
  • forum-style commentaries on modules
• Improve support of Windows platform
  • Simplify compilation of Slicer on Windows Machines
  • Increase speed and stability of Slicer on Windows Machines

See also

• http://wiki.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Slicer4
• http://wiki.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Slicer4:Developers

Attendees

1. Steve Pieper
2. Will Schroeder
3. Jim Miller
4. Ron Kikinis