[vtkusers] please support the Open Anatomy Project: vote for funding!

[Halle, Michael Wilfred,Ph.D.]

Dear VTK community,

I wanted to write to you to ask your support for the Open Anatomy Project, which is the result of the medical imaging analysis and open source software development work done over the last 25 years at the Surgical Planning Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital. 

If you haven't seen it yet, please visit: https://openanatomy.org

(While you are there, please vote for the Open Anatomy Project as part of a BWH research prize.  Anyone can vote!  Tell your friends!)

We are building ways to publish annotated, structured image and geometry data, the underlying data representation of anatomy atlases but also a great way to represent lots of meaningful visualization data.  The tools we are developing include an atlas data format, web-based data viewers, and a backend community portal for developing collaborative atlases.

Once completed, we hope to have "one button export" from VTK-based applications such as 3D Slicer to produce atlases that can then be published for easy viewing and data reuse.  The portal site will offer Wikipedia-like user access to atlases and a vaguely GitHub-like developer experience.

We are publishing atlases that we have developed over the years, but that's just the start.  We want to build up a rich library of atlases, the pieces of which can be used for any purpose (3D printing, VR, ...).  This site ultimately will be one-stop shopping for medical atlases of all sorts, including normal anatomy, anatomical variations, pathology, and surgical plans.

We already using these atlases for educational outreach around the globe. For instance, we are working with African medical partners to develop medical classroom materials to teach the next generation of African medical students.

This is a grand but important vision. We are just at the beginning of this project.  But the success of the VTK, ITK, and Slicer communities proves to us that vibrant communities can emerge around meaningful software and data projects.  Your help is welcome!

Could you please vote for our project by following the "Vote" link when you visit our home page at https://openanatomy.org ? It will help us secure next year's funding and raise the profile of the project.

Thanks so much.
Michael Halle
Ron Kikinis
and the rest of the Open Anatomy Team.


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