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
  • Hotel: Boston Marriott Cambridge, Two Cambridge Center, 50 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, Phone: 1-617-494-6600

Strategy

  • Slicer 3.6.x is in maintenance mode.
  • New development efforts are targeted at Slicer 4.
  • Communication with "Customers" is a top priority.
    • For developers: stabilize the Slicer environment. Slicer has been a moving target for too long.
    • For end-users: simplify the user interface, streamline and simplify common workflows
    • Support the development of solutions
    • We are not in the "early adopter game" for the next two years

Short term goals

  • Targeted for AHM
  • Assign owners for each bullet item on this list

Slicer 3

  • stabilize and debug Slicer 3.6
  • stabilize and document extensions and the process leading to them: My code is on NITRC. Now what?

Slicer 4

  • 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, ability to replace thumbnails
    • Annotation: User-provided description of scenesnapshot/scene (Daniel Haehn)
  • Rons number 2: Make load/save easier to understand for new users.
    • Single interface to all data sources based on QSlicerVolumesIODialog.
    • Plan and implement minimalist UI design for load
  • 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, JC)
  • Rons number 5: VTK Widgets Roadmap (Will)
  • Implement and package up module templates for developers of interactive modules to get a jump on consistent UXP.(wjp)
  • Refine design of slice viewer's control panel to make more compact and quiet. (wjp)
  • Scene module: A new module to organize scenes and scenesnapshots
  • Update Wiki pages:
  • Create a XML Schema for .mrml to check if a mrml document is 'well-formed' and 'valid'. Automatic generated (error free) parser can then be used for accessing/editing mrml files.
  • Bug patches from Slicer 3.6 to Slicer 4

Requests from the DBPs

Utah

Iowa

UCLA

MGH

Longer Term Goals

  • Identify standard workflows and allow CLI modules to declare which workflows they should be run within
    • Perhaps parallel's effort to associate CLI modules with Widgets
  • Reduce list of available modules when a user declares a field-of-interest (e.g., microscopy researchers should not be shown MRI-specific modules)
  • Simplify how tests are written for loadable modules
  • Review all Slicer modules and determine which should be distribute with Slicer and which should be switched to being downloadable
    • Determine support policies for Slicer-included modules versus downloadable modules
    • Determine testing, documentation, review, and platform requirements to be a Slicer-included module
  • DICOM read and write (local and remote) via CTK
  • extended save: save to local and remote destinations. Make plans for logic components, DB transaction, and UI design.
  • Organizing multiple data sets from one subject: time series, image fusion etc.
  • 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
  • Define a "Core" Slicer that can be distributed with InsightApplications repository of ITKv4
    • Review Slicer application framework to support modularization and customization
    • Two audiences:
      • Create new GUI infrastructure where a simple Interface is created for each application area, e.g. one GUI for Radiologists reading brain MRI, another one for torso CT, ...
      • Simple, Extensible Platform for Developers (for custom apps/interfaces).
  • Switch to GIT deferred. Reconsider after the first stable release of Slicer 4.
  • 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")
  • GUI Testing
  • 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)
  • 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.
  • Consider ITKv4 module management tools being developed (after they have been released as stable release)
    • Documentation prior to code development
    • Module-specific dashboards
    • forum-style commentaries on modules
  • Improve support of Windows platform
    • Simplify compilation of Slicer on Windows Machines
    • Increase speed and stability of Slicer on Windows Machines
  • Change release policy: A Slicer release version must not use/depend on ITK Review. If we do not make this modification then we cannot release Slicer as Debian package anymore.
  • Command line module logic redesign
    • DOM objects in shared memory
    • WriteCLI in all mrml nodes

Agenda

  • Review of current commitments and planned activities
    • Kitware
    • GE
    • Isomics
    • St. Louis
    • UCSD
  • Discussion of short term goals
  • Discussion of long term goals

See also

Attendees

  1. Steve Pieper
  2. Will Schroeder
  3. Jim Miller
  4. Ron Kikinis
  5. Alex Yarmarkovich
  6. Jeff Grethe (18th only - 17th @ Neuroscience/Committee meeting)