[Insight-users] Upgrading software from ITK 3.2 to ITK 4.4

[Harri Pölönen]

Hi all!

We have a pretty big medical software which is originally created using ITK
3.20. Now we are interested in upgrading it to use the newest ITK version.
We mainly use functions related to 3D volume processing (affine
transformation etc) and data input/output. There are some new nice features
in ITK4 that we want to use, such as MRI bias correction.

I already tried simply replacing the old ITK with the current one (4.4.2)
and rebuilding everything from the source codes, but that didn't work (not
that I even expected it to work this way). There seem to be some now
obsolete functions/methods in ITK 3.2 and other issues I just need go
through and fix one by one manually.

However, before I start editing our software I would be grateful to hear
any advice and other experiences about similar job. Our software contains
about 400 C++ files and 200 000+ lines of code (not including ITK code), so
there will be a lot of work to do with this upgrade. Specifically I would
like to hear comments on the following questions:

 x How much work is expected? I mean, are there many functions/methods in
ITK 3.2 that do not exist anymore in the modern ITK releases or are called
in a different way? Would it be possible to perform the upgrade in just a
few days or should I book several weeks for the job (obviously this depends
heavily on how our software is built internally)?

 x What are the main known differences between those ITK versions that I
should be aware of? Where will I face the biggest problems?

 x Are there any functions that are protected by patents in ITK 4 but are
free-for-all in ITK 3.2? Our software is commercial, so we don't and won't
use any patented components.

I know there's a backward compatibility option in building ITK 4 but we
don't really want to use it. We prefer to rewrite our code to work directly
with ITK 4 instead.

Thanks!

/ Harri
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