title: Technical note: DIRART--A software suite for deformable image registration and adaptive radiotherapy research.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Recent years have witnessed tremendous progress in image guide radiotherapy technology and a growing interest in the possibilities for adapting treatment planning and delivery over the course of treatment. One obstacle faced by the research community has been the lack of a comprehensive open-source software toolkit dedicated for adaptive radiotherapy (ART). To address this need, the authors have developed a software suite called the Deformable Image Registration and Adaptive Radiotherapy Toolkit (DIRART).
  
  
  METHODS
  DIRART is an open-source toolkit developed in MATLAB. It is designed in an object-oriented style with focus on user-friendliness, features, and flexibility. It contains four classes of DIR algorithms, including the newer inverse consistency algorithms to provide consistent displacement vector field in both directions. It also contains common ART functions, an integrated graphical user interface, a variety of visualization and image-processing features, dose metric analysis functions, and interface routines. These interface routines make DIRART a powerful complement to the Computational Environment for Radiotherapy Research (CERR) and popular image-processing toolkits such as ITK.
  
  
  RESULTS
  DIRART provides a set of image processing/registration algorithms and postprocessing functions to facilitate the development and testing of DIR algorithms. It also offers a good amount of options for DIR results visualization, evaluation, and validation.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  By exchanging data with treatment planning systems via DICOM-RT files and CERR, and by bringing image registration algorithms closer to radiotherapy applications, DIRART is potentially a convenient and flexible platform that may facilitate ART and DIR research. 0 2011 Ameri-
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, School of Medicine, Washington University, Saint Louis, Missouri 63110, USA. dyang@radonc.wustl.edu
authors.forename: Deshan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Scott
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Brame
authors.forename: Issam
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: El Naqa
authors.forename: Apte
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Aditya
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: S Murty
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Goddu
authors.forename: Sasa
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mutic
authors.forename: Joseph O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Deasy
authors.forename: Daniel A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Low
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D008004:Licensure; D011878:Radiotherapy / Q000379:methods*; D012106:Research; D012984:Software / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000600:supply & distribution; D013997:Time Factors; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed; D014584:User-Computer Interface