2011 Winter Project Week:IA FEMesh Slicer4 Port
Prototype IA-FEMesh GUI panel from Qt Designer
Slicer4 Screenshot showing IA-FEMesh module prototype
Key Investigators
- KnowledgeVis: Curtis Lisle
- Isomics: Steve Pieper
- UIowa: Vince Magnotta
Objective
This group developed the Slicer3 IA-FEMesh module to bring the Univ. of Iowa's hexahedral mesh generation, visualizaiton, and mesh improvement, solution to 3D Slicer. The module is working in Slicer3 and is currently being experimentally ported to run under Slicer4.
Approach, Plan
Our plan for the project week is to:
- Work with NA-MIC team (Julien, JC, Steve) to resolve porting problems
- Test new MRML nodes and display nodes for Meshing datatypes
- Begin UI development using Qt Designer
Progress
The main supporting libraries (Meshing/Common, Meshing/Filter) were ported to Slicer4 first. The old KWWidgets functionality for managing the UI was abandoned for Qt widgets created through Designer. This means there is less GUI code to manage state changes for the GUI.
The Surface, building block, and mesh display nodes are working in Slicer4. There are rendering modes not supported yet, but creating our new MRML nodes and associating custom display nodes with them was a direct port from the Slicer3 code base.
By the end of the week, we were able to implement the module far enough for each datatype to be input and rendered in Slicer. Our progress indicates there are no unexpected roadblocks to keep the IA-FEMesh module from being fully ported to Slicer4. So far, our porting effort is going more easily than expected.
