The Insight Toolkit (ITK) is one of several initiatives of the NIH National Library of Medicine (NLM) Visible Human Project. After the Visible Human data was made public in 1995, Dr. Michael Ackerman from the NLM held a meeting to identify the steps necessary to promote the data. The group recognized a need for public software to process the datasets. Terry Yoo and Dr. Ackerman, solicited proposals to build a segmentation and registration toolkit to process the Visible Human data.

Several institutions responded and six contractors were selected: Kitware, GE Corporate R&D, Insightful (previously MathSoft), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Utah, and the University of Pennsylvania. Subcontractors included: the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, the University of Utah and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The initial contract period was three years.

• November 1999: first ITK organizational meeting
  
• January 2000: ITK organizational meeting, the contractors begin to create what is now ITK
  
• March 2000: the first code was checked into the CVS repository
  
• June 2000: a workable image class was made available to the contractors
  
• September 2003: ITK 1.4, the first public release, was made publicly available

After the release, the NLM awarded several Algorithms, Adapters, and Data Distribution (A2D2) contracts to test ITK’s architecture and API design. The NLM also extended the contract period for several of the original contractors. Today the NLM still supports ITK through maintenance contracts, but the bulk of the work is done by the growing, international ITK community. To help us celebrate the longevity of this toolkit, Kitware is hosting several community events.

• Adopt-A-Bug 2.0
  
  We will run a 2nd edition of the Adopt-A-Bug Program. Users can volunteer to adopt-a-bug. In doing so you agree to either fix the bug, or pester/motivate/encourage developers to fix the bug. Adopters will receive full ITK-developer status, including: CVS write access; MANTIS tracker developer status; and recognition in the ITK Wiki.
  
  
• Dashboard Fest 1.0

Dashboard Fest 1.0 was a huge success thanks to your contributions. Our goal was to hit 200 experimental builds, and by the end of the day on Friday November 6, 2009, 1,033 experimental builds had been submitted to the Dashboard from 106 different computers. The following users submitted the largest number of builds:

• Gaëtan Lehmann (INRA)
• Kevin Hobbs (Ohio University)
• Oleksander Dzyubak (Mayo Clinic)
• Arnaud Gelas (Harvard)
• Alexandre Gouaillard (Harvard)
• Kishore Mosaliganti (Harvard)
• Hans Johnson (Iowa)
• Kent Williams (Iowa)
• Bradley Lowekamp (NLM/Lockheed Martin)
• Sean McBride (Rogue Research)
• Mathieu Coursolle (Rogue Research)
• Christian Haselgrove (NITRC)
• Steve Pieper (Brigham and Women’s Hospital)
• Iván Macía (Vicomtech)
• Tom Vercauteren (Mauna Kea Technologies)

Kitware would like to thank everyone who contributed to this event. It is developers like you that help make ITK the amazing toolkit that it has become. Thanks again everyone!

• Send Us Your User Stories
  
  Submit your funny and/or frustrating stories about using ITK to the ITK Wiki. The stories can be informal and as short or long as you like (e.g., I thought that class was for..., things my supervisor never knew about ITK and how I used it). Select stories will be posted to the Kitware Blog set to be released later this Fall!