Overview

Welcome to the Insight Toolkit (ITK).  ITK is an open-source, cross-platform library that provides developers with an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis.  Developed through extreme programming methodologies, ITK builds on a proven, spatially-oriented architecture for processing, segmentation, and registration of scientific images in two, three, or more dimensions. The goals for ITK include:

• Establish a foundation for future, reproducible research.
• Create a repository of fundamental algorithms.
• Develop a platform for advanced product development.
• Support commercial application of the technology.
• Create conventions for future work.
• Support education in scientific image analysis.
• Grow a self-sustaining community of software users and developers.

In 1999 the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health awarded six three-year contracts to develop an open-source registration and segmentation toolkit, that eventually came to be known as the Insight Toolkit (ITK) and formed the basis of the Insight Software Consortium. ITK’s NIH/NLM Project Manager was Dr. Terry Yoo, who coordinated the six prime contractors composing the Insight consortium. These consortium members included three com-mercial partners—GE Corporate R&D, Kitware, Inc., and MathSoft—and three academic partners—University of North Carolina (UNC), University of Tennessee (UT) (Ross Whitaker subsequently moved to University of Utah), and University of Pennsylvania (UPenn). The Principle Investigators for these partners were, respectively, Bill Lorensen at GE CRD, Will Schroeder at Kitware, Vikram Chalana at Insightful, Stephen Aylward with Luis Ibañez at UNC, Ross Whitaker with Josh Cates at UT, and Dimitri Metaxas at UPenn. In addition, several subcontractors rounded out the consortium including Peter Raitu at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Celina Imielinska and Pat Molholt at Columbia University, Jim Gee at UPenn’s Grasp Lab, and George Stetten at the University of Pittsburgh.

In 2002 the first official public release of ITK was made available. In addition, the National Library of Medicine awarded thirteen contracts to several organizations to extend ITK’s capabilities. The NLM has funded maintenance of the toolkit over the years, and a major funding effort was started in July 2010 that culminated with the release of ITK 4.0.0 in December 2011. The ITK community completed a major modernization of the toolkit’s interface, architectural improvements for improved performance, and Python packages for rapid prototyping with ITK 5.0.0, released in May 2019.