[Insight-users] How to combine ITK and VTK

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Kalpathi,

Your observation is correct.

ITK is intended to be used for processing and analysis of
medical images. Visualization and geometrical representation
are not supported in ITK. They are in the scope of VTK.

For this reason it is common to build applications combining
both ITK and VTK, so you get the best of both toolkits.

Note that in some cases you will find overlaps in functionalities,
(e.g. you can run a Median filter using any of the two toolkits),
but for the most part ITK and VTK have complementary functionalities.



You may want to look at the tutorials

           http://www.itk.org/HTML/Tutorials.htm

in particular to

   " Getting Started II: Using ITK with VTK"
   http://www.itk.org/CourseWare/Training/GettingStarted-II.pdf



and the associated source code examples in


      InsightApplications/Auxiliary/vtk/
           itkCurvatureFlowToVTK.cxx
           itkPNGVTKtoITKtoVTK.cxx
           itkReadITKImage3DSegmentShowVTK.cxx*
           itkReadITKImageSegmentShowVTK.cxx*
           itkReadITKImageShowSplineVTK.cxx*
           itkReadITKImageShowVTK.cxx*
           itkVTKtoITKtoVTK.cxx
           vtk2itk.cxx
           vtk2itkDouble.cxx
           vtkPolyDataToITKMesh.cxx



   Regards,


      Luis



--------------------------
Kalpathi Subramanian wrote:
..

> 
> One other question I have.. my understanding is that ITK is primarily
> for processing and analysis of medical datasets. When it comes time
> to things like generating geometry or visualization we use something
> like VTK.. So typically, at that point, do you just convert ITK image
> into a vtk dataset and then continue?  I was trying to understand where
> the boundary for this was. Are there classes in ITK to do things like
> Marching Cubes and other geometry processing?
> 
> I am going through the software guide..
> 
>     == krs