2016 Winter Project Week/Breakout Session/What's Planned for Slicer Core

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Home < 2016 Winter Project Week < Breakout Session < What's Planned for Slicer Core

Introduction

Maintenance needed for core libraries

  • VTK7 (rapid changes coming to VTK due to maintenance grant)
  • Python: conda (and?)or cmake/wheels?
  • Qt5: improvements, plus 4.8 may eventually stop supporting new systems

Organization

  • Moving diffusion to extension
  • Moving EMSegmenter to extension (very large, with lots of data; it would significantly reduce the Slicer installation package size)
  • Endoscopy, PET SUV (small modules, they are just too specific to be included in the core)
  • OpenIGTLinkIF?
  • ...other things to extensions?

Key requests from the community

  • faster startup time (particularly mac)
  • Less confusing UI
  • Add orientation information to vtkImageData (request for VTK, not just Slicer but all VTK-based medical image computing groups suffer a lot because of this)
  • GPU-based volume rendering (it's sad that it's still an issue in 2015)
  • Make it easy to add custom slice and 3D widgets (for various custom quantification, segmentation, planning, targeting, etc. tasks - currently we can observe markup points and create custom models for visualization, but the method is very fragile and many things are missing, for example, no way to detect if the user clicks on a markup, no way to limit number of markups or restrict them to be placed on a certain surface, etc.)
  • Modern, integrated revision control, issue tracking, dashboard, code review, documentation, etc. toolset
  • Simplify data import/export/saving/loading (single-click save to database, direct data loading by drag-and-drop - by inspection of file contents instead of just checking file extension and asking the user how the data should be interpreted, automatic loading of just imported DICOM data, etc.)
  • Faster nightly builds
  • (add your favorites here...)

Roadmaps

  • Steve Pieper: Chronicle, ctkjs, CommonGL
  • JC Fillion-Robin: Girder, Anaconda, Factory machines
  • Andras Lasso: Sequences
  • Csaba Pinter: Segmentations
  • Mike Halle: Slicer webinfrastructure and github
  • Andrey Fedorov: DICOM objects for interoperability
    • focus areas: segmentations, enhanced multiframe (single-file MR series, parametric maps), volumetric measurement structured reports
    • approach
      • developer API in DCMTK
      • reusable command-line converters for extension developers
      • user-level domain-specific applications
    • open question for discussion: should this functionality be in the core or extension