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Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit

Introduction

Welcome to the Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit (MITK). Currently under active development, MITK aims at supporting the development of leading-edge medical imaging software with a high degree of interaction. It combines vtk, itk and the pic-based-libraries of the Div. Medical and Biological Informatics of the DKFZ and adds those features that are most important for developing interactive medical imaging software covered neither by vtk nor itk, i.e:

• multiple, consistent views on the same data. For example, when you have three orthogonal 2D-views and a 3D view and data consisting of a green surface, the surface will be visible and green in all views (as contour lines in 2D, as a surface in 3D), and when you move the surface, it will move in all views. When you try to realize this with basic vtk, you will need to coordinate the position/orientation/color/... of all the views somewhere in your program - exactly this can mitk do for you.
• interactions that create and/or modify data (not only actors as in basic vtk)
• complex interactions with multiple states, e.g., for interaction with active contours
• undo/redo of interactions
• organization of data objects in a tree at run-time, e.g., to represent logical dependencies (e.g., a heart cavity is a part of the heart) or to control the rendering process
• additional properties of arbitrary type can be assigned to data objects contained in the data tree
• visualization and interaction with 3D+t data (basic vtk can handle only 3D data and itk is not for visualization and interaction)
• although mitk is mainly a toolkit and not an application, it offers some support on the application-level, e.g, for structured combination of modules (so-called functionalities), e.g., for combining and switching between one functionality for segmentation and another for registration.

MITK re-uses virtually anything from vtk and itk. Thus, it is not at all a competitor to vtk or itk, but an extension, which tries to ease the combination of both and to add the features outlined above.

Further Reading

MITK concepts

Development with MITK

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