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The Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit: challenges and advances

10 years of open-source development

  • Original Article
  • Published:
International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

   The Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit (MITK) has been available as open-source software for almost 10 years now. In this period the requirements of software systems in the medical image processing domain have become increasingly complex. The aim of this paper is to show how MITK evolved into a software system that is able to cover all steps of a clinical workflow including data retrieval, image analysis, diagnosis, treatment planning, intervention support, and treatment control.

Methods

   MITK provides modularization and extensibility on different levels. In addition to the original toolkit, a module system, micro services for small, system-wide features, a service-oriented architecture based on the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) standard, and an extensible and configurable application framework allow MITK to be used, extended and deployed as needed. A refined software process was implemented to deliver high-quality software, ease the fulfillment of regulatory requirements, and enable teamwork in mixed-competence teams.

Results

   MITK has been applied by a worldwide community and integrated into a variety of solutions, either at the toolkit level or as an application framework with custom extensions. The MITK Workbench has been released as a highly extensible and customizable end-user application. Optional support for tool tracking, image-guided therapy, diffusion imaging as well as various external packages (e.g. CTK, DCMTK, OpenCV, SOFA, Python) is available. MITK has also been used in several FDA/CE-certified applications, which demonstrates the high-quality software and rigorous development process.

Conclusions

   MITK provides a versatile platform with a high degree of modularization and interoperability and is well suited to meet the challenging tasks of today’s and tomorrow’s clinically motivated research.

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Notes

  1. http://www.itk.org.

  2. http://www.vtk.org.

  3. http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/.

  4. http://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/.

  5. http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/.

  6. http://www.openxip.org/.

  7. http://www.mevislab.de/.

  8. http://www.mathworks.com/.

  9. http://www.volview.org/.

  10. http://www.analyzedirect.com/.

  11. http://qt-project.org/.

  12. http://www.boost.org/.

  13. http://dcmtk.org/.

  14. The static (de-) initialization order fiasco is well known to any maintainer of a large C++ software system.

  15. OSGi Alliance, http://www.osgi.org.

  16. http://cppmicroservices.org.

  17. http://commontk.org.

  18. http://mitk.org/Documentation.

  19. The Eclipse Rich Client Platform is best known as the basis for the Eclipse IDE, http://wiki.eclipse.org/Rich_Client_Platform.

  20. IEC 62304, B.8.2 Change control: CHANGE REQUESTS can be approved by a change control board or by a manager or technical lead according to the software configuration management plan. Approved CHANGE REQUESTS are made traceable to the actual modification and VERIFICATION of the software. The requirement is that each actual change be linked to a CHANGE REQUEST and that documentation exists to show that the CHANGE REQUEST was approved. The documentation might be change control board minutes, an approval signature, or a record in a database.

  21. http://bugs.mitk.org.

  22. http://mitk.org/ChangeRequests.

  23. http://www.nitrc.org/projects/mitk-diffusion/.

  24. http://cmic.cs.ucl.ac.uk/home/software/.

  25. http://www.eigen.com/.

  26. http://gimias.org/.

  27. http://www.commontk.org/index.php/The_Team.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the contributors to MITK, which cannot all be listed here. There have been more than one hundred over the time, more than fifty active ones in the last twelve months, thank you! Special thanks to Matt Clarkson for last minute proof-reading!

Conflict of Interest

None.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Medical and Biological Informatics (E130), German Cancer Research Center, Im Neuenheimer Feld 280, 69120 , Heidelberg, Germany

    Marco Nolden, Sascha Zelzer, Alexander Seitel, Diana Wald, Michael Müller, Alfred M. Franz, Markus Fangerau, Matthias Baumhauer, Lena Maier-Hein, Klaus H. Maier-Hein & Hans -Peter Meinzer

  2. Mannheim University of Applied Sciences, Paul-Wittsack-Str. 10, 68163 , Mannheim, Germany

    Ivo Wolf

  3. Mint Medical GmbH, Friedrich-Ebert-Str. 2, 69221 , Dossenheim, Heidelberg, Germany

    Daniel Maleike & Matthias Baumhauer

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  1. Marco Nolden
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Correspondence to Marco Nolden.

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Nolden, M., Zelzer, S., Seitel, A. et al. The Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit: challenges and advances. Int J CARS 8, 607–620 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-013-0840-8

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