ITK Release 4/Migration Plan/Release Notes/ITKv4 Final Release Notes

Overview

The final release of ITK 4.0 took place on December 20th 2011. This new release of ITK is the outcome of 18 months of refactoring efforts, generously sponsored by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), with funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

The main features of this new release include:

• Code Modularization
• New simplified layer “SimpleITK”
• New registration framework
• New level set framework
• Refactored FEM framework
• New support for video processing
  • Including bridges to OpenCV and VXL
• Updated support for DICOM based on GDCM 2.0
• Improved support for large images (above 4Gb)
• Improved support file formats commonly used in microscopy.

A general code cleanup of the toolkit took place, based on focusing on supporting modern C++ compilers and removing code intended for obsolete ones.

The Software Development process for ITK was modernized by:

• Migrating from CVS to Git
• Adopting the code review tool Gerrit
• Developing a system, cdash@home, for distributed testing of patches
• Adopting a new process for dealing with data for testing

The Insight Journal was also adapted to take advantage of these new software tools. In particular, it is now possible to submit contributions to the Insight Journal by pointing to existing Git repositories in which the code contribution is continuously being developed.

The toolkit adopted the Apache 2.0 License in replacement for the BSD license. WrapITK has been integrated into the modularized tree for Python and Java bindings. Doxygen documentation generation has been improved, including documentation of groups and modules, wiki example links, diagrams, and a crowd-sourcing tool to create Gerrit patches from the web interface.

A large team of developers collaborated in order to bring this release to fruition. The funded team is listed here: http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_Release_4/The_Team. This is a historical event for the ITK community, we encourage you to give it a try and to share your impressions with us.

Official Kitware News Item

ITK 4.0 is Now Available and Ready for Download! Kitware is pleased to announce the release of ITK 4.0.0 and the availability of its final binaries, which are now available for download on the ITK download page. This release is the outcome of 18 months of refactoring efforts, generously sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) with funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

New features included in ITK 4.0.0 include modularization, a simplified accessibility layer called “SimpleITK,” new frameworks for registration and level setting, a newly-refactored finite element (FEM) framework, video processing support, updated DICOM support based on GDCM 2.0, and improved support for large microscopy images above 4 GB.

A general code cleanup of the toolkit also took place, focusing on supporting modern C++ compilers and removing code intended for obsolete ones. The ITK development process was also revamped for version 4 through migration to Git, adoption the code review tool Gerrit, and development of a new process for dealing with testing data.

The Insight Journal, ITK’s open-access journal for medical image processing and visualization, was also adapted to take advantage to the new tools provided in ITK 4.0. The toolkit adopted the Apache 2.0 License as a replacement for the BSD license. Wrap ITK has additionally been integrated into the modularized tree for Python and Java bindings. Doxygen documentation generation has been improved for groups and modules, wiki example links, diagrams, and a crowdsourcing tool for creating Gerrit patches from a web interface.

The release of ITK 4.0 marks a historical event for the ITK community. It was made possible by a large, collaborative team of developers who are fully listed on the ITK Wiki. The code swarm below shows all contributions to ITK 4.0