[vtkusers] VTK + Windows -> Commerical App - Feasibility ??

[Lisa Avila]

Hello,



>Specific to medical, do you think offering from TerraRecon/Voxar are better ?
>What works best for any product development ?

I am not familiar with Voxar so I cannot comment on it.

TeraRecon (as far as I understand their product line) offers complete 
end-user solutions, not toolkits. The exception to this is VLI which is the 
library they have to support their VolumePro boards. This is not a 
"visualization" library, but rather a "volume rendering" library. It only 
works on systems that have a VolumePro board. FYI - VTK has support for the 
VolumePro too (although not as extensive as the support you can get from 
using VLI directly - VTK supports with the VolumePro essentially the same 
volume rendering you have with the ray caster or texture mapper, but not 
some of the special features that are more unique to the VolumePro 1000).

 > I tested other native ( Win32, MFC and OpenGL ) based apps with VTK
 > examples and MicroCT app. ( Only one I could find build using VTK )

You can try downloading VolView 1.3 from the Kitware web pages - this uses 
mostly VTK (except for the GUI code obviously) so you can see the 
performance of VTK for displaying images, rendering volumes and surfaces, 
etc. "Slow" and "Fast" are subject to interpretation, but I would argue 
that this functionality in VTK is at least "interactive" on any recently 
acquired desktop system. Of course, there are many ways to achieve the same 
results in a toolkit as large as VTK - you could loop through the display 
of a stack of images in a way that is quite fast, and using a different 
technique for extracting / displaying the data your results could be 
horribly slow. I would assume that most of your problems will go away once 
you have a deeper understanding of the toolkit.


Lisa