[IGSTK-Developers] Re: FW: Tracking

[Will Schroeder]

Kevin-

We know David Gobbi very well; he is a crackerjack programmer, one of the 
best. He contributed image reslice code as well as refactoring the 
vtkTransform hierarchy. We also know of Atami (I believe Ken Martin visited 
them about a year ago). Getting them involved would only help IGSTK as long 
as there are no difficult politics/management issues.

Will

At 04:32 PM 2/23/2005, Kevin Cleary wrote:
>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
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>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
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>-----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