[IGSTK-Developers] FW: Tracking

[Kevin Cleary]

Here is an interesting development. The group from Terry Peter's lab in
Canada, a leading group in image-guided surgery, has heard of IGSTK and may
be interested in contributing their tracker code.

This group has formed a spin-off company called Atamai dedicated to
open-source code

This guy David Gobbi contributed the re-slice class to VTK and I think he is
a very good developer

http://atamai.com/

I asked if they would be willing to contribute the code to IGSTK and it may
be a possibility - but there is a caveat here in they want to think about
how their company would benefit

So let me throw this out and if there is time on the tcon tomorrow we can
discuss briefly - if we think it is worth discussing further I will get Will
Schroeder's opinion as well

Regards all

Kevin
  
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Kevin Cleary, Ph.D.                        Work phone: 202-687-8253
Associate Professor                        Work fax: 202-784-3479
Deputy Director  
                            
Imaging Science and Information Systems (ISIS) Center
Department of Radiology                    Pager: 202-901-2033
Georgetown University Medical Center       Cell phone: 202-294-3409
2115 Wisconsin Avenue, Suite 603           Home phone: 301-299-0788
Washington, DC, 20007                      Home fax: 301-299-0789
 
ISIS center: www.isis.georgetown.edu
Research group: www.caimr.georgetown.edu
WashCAS: www.washcas.org
Email: cleary at georgetown.edu
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-----Original Message-----
From: David Gobbi [mailto:dgobbi at atamai.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 3:37 PM
To: Kevin Cleary
Cc: Terry Peters; Yves Starreveld
Subject: Tracking

Hi Kevin,

Here is my email, as promised.  Also, if you want to contact me by phone 
my number is (519)488-0363.

The groups that have been using Atamai's tracking code (either 
AURORA/POLARIS or Flock of Birds) include a handful of scientists here 
at Robarts, Louis Collins in Montreal, the SINTEF group in Norway, plus 
a couple other European groups.  The code has been under constant use 
and development since 1998 and it's very sturdy.

The big reason for writing the core code in C instead of as a C++ class 
in VTK was reusability.  If we'd written everything in VTK, then we 
couldn't reuse the tracking code in non-VTK projects.  So it made sense 
for us to write a neat-and-tidy C library to talk to the tracking 
device, and a set of thin VTK classes that use that C library.  This 
sort of mixed development is everywhere in VTK and ITK.  For example, 
ITK uses C libraries for XML, JPEG, TIFF, DICOM.  Why reinvent the wheel?

Let me know how things go in your discussion with Kitware.

Thanks,
 - David