SimITK: Visual Programming of the ITK Image-Processing Library within Simulink

Abstract

The Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) is a software library used for image analysis, visualization, and image-guided surgery applications. ITK is a collection of C++ classes that poses the challenge of a steep learning curve should the user not have appropriate C++ programming experience. To remove the programming complexities and facilitate rapid prototyping, an implementation of ITK within a higher-level visual programming environment is presented: SimITK. ITK functionalities are automatically wrapped into "blocks" within Simulink, the visual programming environment of MATLAB, where these blocks can be connected to form workflows: visual schematics that closely represent the structure of a C++ program. The heavily templated C++ nature of ITK does not facilitate direct interaction between Simulink and ITK; an intermediary is required to convert respective data types and allow intercommunication. As such, a SimITK "Virtual Block" has been developed that serves as a wrapper around an ITK class which is capable of resolving the ITK data types to native Simulink data types. Part of the challenge surrounding this implementation involves automatically capturing and storing the pertinent class information that need to be refined from an initial state prior to being reflected within the final block representation. The primary result from the SimITK wrapping procedure is multiple Simulink block libraries. From these libraries, blocks are selected and interconnected to demonstrate two examples: a 3D segmentation workflow and a 3D multimodal registration workflow. Compared to their pure-code equivalents, the workflows highlight ITK usability through an alternative visual interpretation of the code that abstracts away potentially confusing technicalities.

SimpleITK Image-Analysis Notebooks: a Collaborative Environment for Education and Reproducible Research

“…Examples of standalone programs include 3D Slicer [8], ITK-SNAP [30] and the MITK Workbench [19]. Examples of visual programming environments include SCIRun [20], MeVisLab [23], ITKBoard [17], and SimITK [6]. The only two efforts, of which we are aware, that incorporate ITK components directly into an interpreted programming environment include [5], incorporating ITK into the MATLAB scripting language (MathWorks, Natick, MA, USA), and the effort of incorporating ITK into the Python language initiated by the ITK developers [13].…”

SimITK: model driven engineering for medical imaging

“…However, many potential users do not attempt to take advantage of this toolkit due to their lack of programming background and the steep learning curve that is associated with ITK. It is for this reason that SimITK was developed 2,3,4 .…”