Abstract

The National Library of Medicine Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit, shortened as the Insight Toolkit (ITK), is an open-source software toolkit for performing registration and segmentation. Segmentation is the process of identifying and classifying data found in a digitally sampled representation. Typically the sampled representation is an image acquired from such medical instrumentation as CT or MRI scanners. Registration is the task of aligning or developing correspondences between data. For example, in the medical environment, a CT scan may be aligned with a MRI scan in order to combine the information contained in both.

ITK is a cross-platform software. It uses a build environment known as CMake to manage platform-specific project generation and compilation process in a platform-independent way. ITK is implemented in C++. ITK’s implementation style employs generic programming, which involves the use of templates to generate, at compile-time, code that can be applied generically to any class or data-type that supports the operations used by the template. The use of C++ templating means that the code is highly efficient and many issues are discovered at compile-time, rather than at run-time during program execution. It also means that many of ITK’s algorithms can be applied to arbitrary spatial dimensions and pixel types.

An automated wrapping system integrated with ITK generates an interface between C++ and a high-level programming language Python. This enables rapid prototyping and faster exploration of ideas by shortening the edit-compile-execute cycle. In addition to automated wrapping, the SimpleITK project provides a streamlined interface to ITK that is available for C++, Python, Java, CSharp, R, Tcl and Ruby.

Developers from around the world can use, debug, maintain, and extend the software because ITK is an open-source project. ITK uses a model of software development known as Extreme Programming. Extreme Programming collapses the usual software development methodology into a simultaneous iterative process of design-implement-test-release. The key features of Extreme Programming are communication and testing. Communication among the members of the ITK community is what helps manage the rapid evolution of the software. Testing is what keeps the software stable. An extensive testing process supported by the system known as CDash measures the quality of ITK code on a daily basis. The ITK Testing Dashboard is updated continuously, reflecting the quality of the code at any moment.

The most recent version of this document is available online at https://itk.org/ItkSoftwareGuide.pdf. This book is a guide for developing software with ITK; it is the first of two companion books. This book covers building and installation, general architecture and design, as well as the process of contributing in the ITK community. The second book covers detailed design and functionality for reading and writing images, filtering, registration, segmentation, and performing statistical analysis.

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