Tuesday

Tutorial 6
Visualizing the Human Body with ITK and VTK (Full day) [proposal]
Stephen R. Aylward, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Josh Cates, University of Utah
Luis Ibanez, Kitware, Inc.
Bill Lorensen, GE's Corporate Research and Development Center
Ross Whitaker, University of Utah
Terry Yoo, National Library of Medicine, NIH

This tutorial introduces the concepts required for making use of the Open-Source toolkits ITK and VTK for visualizing anatomical structures. ITK (also known as Insight) is the Registration and Segmentation toolkit developed by the initiative of the National Library of Medicine with the aim of supporting the Visible Human Project. Visualizing anatomical structures from volume data such as CT scans, MRI, and Cryogenic data requires a combination of visualization algorithms with registration and segmentation algorithms. VTK (the Visualization Toolkit) is a mature Open-Source library that offers the functionality required for performing sophisticated visualizations. It is well-known, however, that high-quality visualization approaches like volume-rendering can produce much better results when they are accompanied of anatomically correct segmentations of the volume data.

Attendees to this tutorial will get introduced to the procedures required for downloading, configuring and building these two open-source toolkits. An overview of the Segmentation algorithms available in ITK will be presented and instructions about how to combine them with VTK visualization algorithms will be provided.

Registration supports finding a common reference frame for visualizing multi-modality data sets belonging to the same patient or sets of same modality volumes from different patients. The tutorial will also present the mechanisms by which ITK can be used to register medical data sets that are then visualized using VTK. Real-life applications of VTK / ITK to medical image data visualization will be presented. Both VTK and ITK licenses allow to use these toolkits free of charge for academic and commercial applications.