VTK News (Segmentation Toolkit, Vis '99, VTK3.0)

[Will Schroeder]

Hi Folks-

This note contains some general news about or relating to VTK 
(NLM segmentation toolkit, IEEE Visualization '99; VTK Release 3.0).

1) Segmentation Toolkit.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of 
Health (NIH), in collaboration with partner institutes and agencies 
NIDCR, NEI, NSF, NIDCD, and NCI (the "N" for nation in this case being 
the USA, see below for acronym definitions) has awarded a three year, 
multi-million dollar contract to six groups to develop an open source 
segmentation and registration toolkit. The groups include GE Research, 
Kitware, UNC-CH, UPenn, U. of Tennesee, and MathSoft. (Subcontractors 
include Harvard Brigham & Women's Hospital, UPenn's GRASP Lab, 
Columbia University, and the Univ. of Pittsburgh). 

The goal of the project is to design an OO system with a breadth of 
algorithms and data structures to support manual, semi-automatic, and 
automatic registration and segmentation (with a focus on 3D). While 
early versions of the software will be focused on the Visible Human 
datasets from NLM, the toolkit is to be designed as general as possible 
for future applications. The hope is that at the end of the three years 
the toolkit will continue with a life of its own (similar to the VTK community).

What makes this really interesting for VTK users is that the lead 
architects of the toolkit include the VTK folks (at GE and Kitware), 
and it looks like (no guarantees at this point) the architecture will 
be quite similar to VTK - certainly we will make sure VTK works VERY 
well with this toolkit. Also, open source software has gained a significant
boost with sponsorship from a prestigious organization like NLM. 

If you're interested in knowing more, you'll want to contact Terry Yoo 
at NLM (yoo at nlm.nih.gov). And for those of you looking to download the 
code - the first release probably won't be ready for at least 1.5 to 2 
years, and maybe longer. 

(Acronyms:
NIDCR = National Institute for Dental and Craniofacial Research 
NEI = National Eye Insitute 
NSF = National Science Foundation 
NIDCD = National Institute for Deafness and other Communication Disorders 
NCI = National Cancer Institute)


2. IEEE Visualization '99

We recently returned from the IEEE Visualization '99 conference. There was a VTK interactive course (computers in the classroom) taught by Ken Martin, Jim Miller, Bill Lorensen, Lisa Avila, and Will Schroeder. Will Schroeder spoke on a panel (State-of-the-Art In Distributed & Parallel Visualization Systems). Charles Law presented a technical paper on the VTK streaming architecture. We also had a well attended BOF (VTK User's Group meeting) on Thursday evening.

The BOF was interesting because of the feedback that was given, and because of Bill Lorensen's stellar performance describing the VTK quality control process (i.e., the dashboard). Some of the feedback included:
	- better documentation (especially in the examples)
	- volume rendering unstructured data
	- haptics support
	- objects to extract information / perform analysis (like mass properties)
	- support time directly in pipeline
	- support n-dimensional coordinates
	- more support for progressive/multi-resolution
	- supporting "void" spaces in dataset
	- geometry filter (i.e., topological neighborhood operations) too slow ("is a dog" was the quote)
	- organized work assignments

This last point is particularly interesting. The feedback we got suggested that we need a list of "projects" that we can refer to, so that the VTK community can start contributing to and benefiting from the variety of skills out there.


3. Release of VTK3.0

This is a priority, many of the VTK developers were travelling the last few weeks. We are trying to clean up the dashboard, and make sure that the streaming technology is solid. We received some feedback from parallel processing experts at IEEE Vis '99 who suggested we take a closer look, which we are doing. (We've been somewhat unhappy with the streaming: it's very complicated and introduces a lot of complexity into portions of the code.)

Will


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