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[ANNOUNCE] Insight Toolkit 1.2 for Debian (unofficial)



Unofficial Debian packages are now available for:

-= The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) =-


* What is ITK?

ITK is a cross-platform open-source image processing 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.  The design of ITK focuses on medical imaging, though it can be
used in broader imaging applications.

ITK provides a pipeline architecture, data representation, filters and
file I/O for multiple formats.

The goals for the project include the following:

    - Support the Visible Human Project
    - Establish a foundation for future research
    - Create a repository of fundamental algorithms
    - Develop a platform for advanced product development
    - Create conventions for future work
    - Grow a self-sustaining community of software users and developers


* About the ITK Project

The ITK project began in 1999, as a project funded by the US National
Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.  The ITK
project is part of the Visible Human project, and is now used on a great
variety of imaging projects all over the world, both universities and
the private sector.

ITK is developed by the Insight Consortium and the broader community. 
The consortium includes GE Corporate R&D, Kitware, Insightful and the
three academic partners University of North Carolina, University of
Tennessee, and the University of Pennsylvania.


* How do I use ITK?

ITK is written in C++ and that is currently the primary language
supported.  However in the future, wrapped bindings are planned to
support Tcl, Java and Python.  Many examples are provided to illustrate
how to write code using ITK.


* What are the main features of ITK?

  - Pipeline data-flow architecture with support for multi-threading and
parallel processing 
  - Data representation for N-dimensional images, meshes and geometric
objects
  - Algorithms for performing segmentation and registration
  - File filters to handle major imaging formats (eg. DICOM, Gipl,
Analyze, PNG, MetaImage, VOL, VTK)
  - Numerical library (VNL) for mathematics (eg. matrix calculations)


* What doesn't ITK do?

ITK is designed as an image processing engine, and does _not_ address
graphical user interfaces or data visualisation; this is left up to
other libraries.  ITK has successfully been integrated into many GUI
front-ends.

For visualisation, the powerful VTK is most popular, but a number of
options are available:

    - The Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) - http://www.vtk.org/
    - VisPack - http://rolle.engr.utk.edu/~vision/vispack/
    - 3dViewnix - http://mipgsun.mipg.upenn.edu/~Vnews/

A number of GUI toolkits have been used and integrated.  The following
are known to work (and examples are available):

    - The Gimp Toolkit (Gtk+) - http://www.gtk.org/
    - The Fast Light Toolkit (FLTK) - http://www.fltk.org/
    - The Q Toolkit (Qt) - http://www.qtk.org/


* Which Packages are available?

Packages for all the officially released tarballs have been produced.
The core source tarball has been packaged into:

    o  libinsighttoolkit1 - the runtime libraries
    o  libinsighttoolkit1-dev - the runtime libraries
    o  insighttoolkit1.2-examples - example programs (source)

The applications (nearly all of them) have been packaged into:

    o  insighttoolkit1.2-apps - source and binaries

The API reference documentation (doxygen-generated HTML) has been
packaged into:

    o  insighttoolkit1.2-doc - HTML documentaiton


* Where can I get the packages?

Currently the packages are unofficial (ie. not a part of Debian).  Soon
the packages will be included in Debian main, and incorporated into the
Debian-Med project.

The packages are available from the Debian Mentors repository at:

    http://mentors.debian.net/

Instructions on how to add this repository to your apt sources list is
available on the website.  More information on the packaging project is
available from:

    http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~gavinb/projects/itk.php


* What is the Licence?

The ITK project uses a BSD-style licence.  This means it can be used in
both free/open projects as well as proprietary projects.  Full details
are available at http://www.itk.org/HTML/Copyright.htm.


* How do I get involved?

The ITK community is based around the itk-users mailing list.  Subscribe
at:

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


* Where can I find out more?

Visit the Insight Toolkit website at:

    http://www.itk.org/


-- 
Gavin Baker // gavinb*antonym_org // Linux|Python|Esperanto|MIDI|Cheese



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