SimpleITK/Tcon 2010 08 12

Tcon topics 8/12/2010

Notes from discussions held during the tcon:

• Gabe Hart reported on experiments with wrapping SimpleITK for Java
  • How to manage classpath ?
  • How to organize ITK classes into jar file.
    • Should they follow the distribution of "modular ITK" ?
• Synergy between WrapITK and SimpleITK
  • Could we use WrapITK infrastructure to generate the instantiations of SimpleITK ?
• Brad L. reported on experiments using template metaprogramming for selecting pixel types
  • Example implemented: http://github.com/blowekamp/SimpleITK/network
• Discussion about what pixel types to provide
  • Should they be extendable by a user ?
  • How about "unsigned long" ? (or is it Label Maps what we really want ?)
• Label Maps
  • We agree in that they should be a first class citizen object, at the pair of the image
  • How to map LabelObjects from one image grid coordinates to another ?
    • Do we need a "resample label map" filter ?
• Procedural look and feel
  • Should SimpleITK has a procedural look ? (ala Matlab ?)
  • Or the sequence of "create object, set parameter, set parameter.... execute"
  • Can we have both ?
    • Without one diminishing the other ?
• What to do with basic Arrat types ?
  • Point, Vector, CovariantVector
    • How to hide their dimension ?
  • Introduce a generic "Array" class at SimpleITK level ?
    • maybe with an internal enum indicating that it is a Point, Vector or CovariantVector ?
    • Manage Dimension dynamically (or hide it internally), just like the simple Image class.
• SimpleITK making it look natural in Wrapped languages
  • Provide functionalities for converting ITK classes into classes of the target language
    • In Java: be able to convert a simpleImage into a Java BufferedImage class, and back.
    • In Python: be able to convert an simpleImage into a Python Image or at least a python array.
• SimpleITK & Visualization
  • Should we provide some simple visualization capabilities ?
  • Easy conversion from ITK simpleImage to vtkImageData
  • Basic Viewer example (maybe based on Qt+VTK: or CTK for that matter) that takes origin, spacing and orientation into account.
• What pixel types to include ?
  • Suggested for Microscopy
    • unsigned char (int8)
    • signed short (int16)
    • unsigned short (uint16)
    • signed int (int32)
    • unsigned int (uint32)
    • float (float32)
    • double