ITK/10th Anniversary Activities/ITK Stories and anecdotes

ITK First Decade Stories and Anecdotes

What ?

Share with the community your stories and anecdotes of using ITK during the past ten years.

Format ?

This is an informal forum.

Short stories with funny connotation are more than welcome.

Examples

• Tell us about
  • The oldest computer in which you have run ITK
  • The weirdest compilation option that you have tried with ITK
  • The longest you have run an ITK program

Other options:

• Things my supervisor never knew about how I used ITK...
  • (anonymous submissions are fine in this one...)

• Saved by an Insight Journal paper
  • Have you been saved from having to write a lot of code, thanks to an Insight Journal paper ?
  • Tell us your story.

STORIES

ITK Experiences at UNC, the CADDLab

ITK Grows Up!

• This story illustrates the difficult path ITK followed in its early years.
• Part 1: 2001-ish
  • Michael Bell, a research assistant in the CADDLab, walks into Stephen Aylward's office to discuss his project. He has begun using the beta version of ITK. When asked what he thinks about ITK, he responds:
    • "There are so many templates and long function names that I don't feel like I'm programming in C++ anymore" He did not mean that as a compliment!
• Part 2: 2003-ish
  • Julien Jomier, a research assistant in the CADDLab, walks into Stephen Aylward's office to discuss his project. Stephen suggests that he consider prototyping it using Matlab. Julien responds:
    • "Actually, I'd rather use ITK. It's faster." That was one of the best compliments ITK could receive!

CMake, the only good thing to come from ITK?

• Even the ITK development team had their doubts at the beginning!
• George Stetten and Stephen Aylward are sitting next to one another in an ITK developers meeting in 2002-ish. Bill Hoffman is presenting CMake, which is already gaining popularity. George leans over to Stephen and says
  • "Ever worry that the only good thing that will come of ITK is CMake?"
  • There is no doubt that CMake has been a huge success, but so has ITK!!!

ITK early adopters

• George Stetten and Stephen are talking at a conference. George has just begun converting his lab to use ITK for all of its projects. Stephen asks George how it is going, George responds:
  • "Research in my lab has ground to a complete halt."
  • Early integration of ITK into a lab was extremely challenging. It has since been greatly facilitated by its extensive software guide, CMake, and community support.

University of Iowa

Insight Journal, Success Story

From Hans Johnson at the University of Iowa:

http://www.itk.org/mailman/private/insight-developers/2006-February/007661.html

 My graduate student has been doing some atlas based segmentation were signed
 distance maps of binary objects are passively deformed.  One of the major
 bottle necks is creating the signed distance maps with the Danielson
 Distance Map, and the Future work section of his thesis stated that the work
 by Maurer should be investigated as a possible way to speed this up.

Timeline to success:

• 9:26am e-mail arrives about a new Insight Journal submission
• 12:30am print and read documentation while
• 12:45am download source code, replace Dannielson Filter with new EDT filter, and compile
• 1:00pm run on 1 dataset
• 1:03pm curse because it could not possibly have been done in only 3 minutes.
• 1:10pm compare new results to old results, do dance of joy because new results are nearly the same as old results
• 4:00pm Write Insight Journal review

  Good work Penn Image Computing and Science Laboratory!
  Thanks,
  Hans