title: The medical imaging interaction toolkit.
abstract: Thoroughly designed, open-source toolkits emerge to boost progress in medical imaging. The Insight Toolkit (ITK) provides this for the algorithmic scope of medical imaging, especially for segmentation and registration. But medical imaging algorithms have to be clinically applied to be useful, which additionally requires visualization and interaction. The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has powerful visualization capabilities, but only low-level support for interaction. In this paper, we present the Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit (MITK). The goal of MITK is to significantly reduce the effort required to construct specifically tailored, interactive applications for medical image analysis. MITK allows an easy combination of algorithms developed by ITK with visualizations created by VTK and extends these two toolkits with those features, which are outside the scope of both. MITK adds support for complex interactions with multiple states as well as undo-capabilities, a very important prerequisite for convenient user interfaces. Furthermore, MITK facilitates the realization of multiple, different views of the same data (as a multiplanar reconstruction and a 3D rendering) and supports the visualization of 3D+t data, whereas VTK is only designed to create one kind of view of 2D or 3D data. MITK reuses virtually everything from ITK and VTK. Thus, it is not at all a competitor to ITK or VTK, but an extension, which eases the combination of both and adds the features required for interactive, convenient to use medical imaging software. MITK is an open-source project (www.mitk.org).
authors.affiliation: Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum (DKFZ), Div. Medical and Biological Informatics/B010, Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, D-69120 Heidelberg, Germany. i.wolf@dkfz.de
authors.forename: Ivo
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Wolf
authors.forename: Marcus
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vetter
authors.forename: Ingmar
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Wegner
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Böttger
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Nolden
authors.forename: Max
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schöbinger
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hastenteufel
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kunert
authors.forename: Hans-Peter
authors.initials: HP
authors.lastname: Meinzer
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003952:Diagnostic Imaging / Q000379:methods*; D007089:Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods*; D007090:Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface