EngineeringRetreat2010

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Goals: Develop clarity and a plan for this year's work; establish broader strategic vision for the next four NAMIC years.

Logistics

• When: November 17-18 (Wednesday and Thursday). Start time: noon Wednesday, end time: early afternoon Thursday
• Where: Boston SPL, 1249 Facility
• Who: Engineering Core leaders and key personnel

Wishlist for Engineering core

• New development efforts are targeted at Slicer4. Slicer 3.6.x is in maintenance mode.
• Communication with Service and Algorithm cores should remain a top priority.

Short term goals

• Targeted for AHM
• Assign owners for each bullet item on this list
• Rons number 1: Augment scenes and scenesnapshots (see also its counterpart, the Image Database UI)
  • Thumbnails: user selectable toggle: 3d viewer (default), whole frame, red slice viewer
  • Annotation: User-provided description of scenesnapshot/scene
  • Tool to replace thumbnails, edit annotations
• Rons number 2: Unified load/save: harmonize loading and saving of different types of data, from local and remote data sources. Plan and implement minimalist UI design, missing logic components, and, possibly, local database
• Rons number 3: Review Slicer3 bug tracker for issues and feature requests - in UI, particular widgets, command line modules, improved transforms/registration... (Steve)
• Rons number 4: Keep Slicer4 Qt port on schedule (JF)
• Rons number 5: VTK Widgets Roadmap (Will)
• Scene snapshot module: reorder, rename
• organizing multiple data sets from one subject: time series, image fusion etc.
• Service core will have the Slicer 4 CMAKE superbuild with support for extensions wiki page ready for project week Jan 2011

longer term infrastructure improvements

• Define a "Core" Slicer that can be distributed with InsightApplications repository of ITKv4
  • Review Slicer application framework to support modularization and customization
  • Two audiences:
    • Simple Interface for Radiologists
    • Simple, Extensible Platform for Developers (for custom apps/interfaces).
• Switch to GIT
• Switch to client/server dashboards and take advantage of its benefits
  • Each night binaries copied from client machines to Dashboard page/database that manages them
  • Ensures Dashboards, builds, releases using common tags/svn#s
  • Ensures available binaries include last-successful build, last-release build, and last-nights build.
  • Dashboard specifies what should be build on what clients ("CDash@home" or "Client/Server CDash")
• Consider ITKv4 module management tools being developed
  • Documentation prior to code development
  • Module-specific dashboards
  • forum-style commentaries on modules
• Packaging/Superbuild fixes
  • Package for linux
  • Windows - clean registry on uninstall
  • Mac - .dmg into application folder
• Creation of a Display Module
• Make plans for a new and improved Editor for slicer4
  • Grow Cuts, RSS and fast Marching with volume cropping, integral volume rendering, (limited) GPU acceleration
• Investigate use of a binary mask used with volume rendering to specify non-rectilinear ROIs, to display segmentation results, and to display effects of interactive editing
• extended save: save to local and remote destinations. Make plans for logic components, DB transaction, and UI design.
• GUI Testing
  • There is now an open-source method for automated testing of Qt-based applications: http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Testing_design
• Support scenes containing data that spans multiple scales in time and space
  • visualize, indicate correspondence and support interactions with a scene in which the data differ by orders of magnitude and change over time
• Infrastructure that supports simultaneous GPU-based volume rendering and GPU-based interactive segmentation methods (vtkWidgets)
• Guidelines and examples for GPU-based algorithms
• Interactive/iterative command-line modules (e.g., tied to a vtkWidget)
• DICOM via CTK
• Determine an alternative to Mantis/bug-tracking. We have over 495 bugs.
• Batch processing (IPython) examples
  • includes an algorithm validation framework
• Interact with ITKv4 (once released?), CTK, NiPy, and other like-minded projects.

See also

• http://wiki.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Slicer4
• http://wiki.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Slicer4:Developers

Attendees

1. Steve Pieper
2. Will Schroeder
3. Jim Miller
4. Ron Kikinis