Collaboration/NWU/Radiology Workstation

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Our clinical workstation integrated with Slicer3's main viewer, under development at Northwestern

Key Investigators

• Northwestern: David S. Channin, Pat Mongkolwat, Skip Talbot, Alex Kogan, Vladimir Kleper
• Isomics: Steve Pieper

Objective

The goal of our project is to be able to use Slicer3's advanced imaging algorithms and 3D functionality from inside a clinical workstation being developed at Northwestern University. We'd also like to reconfigure use of the main viewer for a new way to interact with the volume that might be more efficient for clinical use. Our main objectives to accomplish this goal include:

• Integrate the rendering and functionality of Slicer3 into a .Net foundation GUI for use in a clinical workstation
• Create a new representation of the 3D volume as a cube with an oblique cut plane rather than the default three orthogonal cut planes

Approach, Plan

To implement this integration process, we have taken the following steps:

• Convert Slicer3 into a managed class object
• Extract the renderers through existing accesor methods and add them to managed renderers using a VTK .Net wrapper
• Convert KWWidgets into .Net Controls
• Implement volume cube representation with existing Slicer3 code

Progress

We integrated Slicer3 alpha with our 2D workstation by directly modifying the Slicer3 base code, passing window handles through Slicer3's GUI objects. Modifying the base code prevented maintainability of Slicer3 updates as changes had to be reimplimented. Currently, we can integrate the Slicer3 beta without modifying the base code by extracting the render windows through existing accessor methods and adding them to our workstation through a managed version of VTK.

References

• A Translation Station for Imaging: P. Mongkolwat, T. Lechner, T. Johnson, A. Kogan, S. Talbot, D. S. Channin; Radiological Society of North America, Chicago, IL. November 2006.
• Advancing Advanced Visualization in the Clinical Environment: S. Talbot, P. Mongkolwat, D. S. Channin; Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM), Providence, RI, To be presented, June 2007.