Bridging Slicer and KiwiViewer

The 3D Slicer team at Kitware is pleased to introduce the SlicerToKiwiExporter module for 3D Slicer. This module provides medical researchers a method for readily distributing their Slicer models to mobile devices such as iOS and Android phones and tablets for interactive visualization using Kitware’s KiwiViewer.

The potential uses of this technology are broad and significant. It has already been used to share visualizations with an audience at an annual medical congress. Furthermore, clinicians are now able to create 3D models in Slicer and with this module they can then interact with those models on an iPad to help the patient understand their condition and treatment plans. Similarly, drug studies are able to display treatment results in interactive case studies. Medical educators are able to create custom, interactive teaching files for medical students, based on current cases.

The SlicerToKiwiExporter module provides a simple and intuitive interface for converting scenes from 3D Slicer into KiwiViewer’s scene format. Slicer is a freely available, open-source product of the National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (NAMIC). Slicer provides advanced image analysis algorithms for clinically-oriented medical research. Since 2011, Slicer has been significantly refactored, updated, and extended by Kitware, under the direction of Steve Pieper, Ron Kikinis, and other NAMIC collaborators. KiwiViewer is an app for exploring scientific and medical data on Android and iOS mobile devices. It provides multi-touch interaction and can access data from SD cards, as email attachments, from Midas installations (e.g., from the National Library of Medicine), and via DropBox.

SlicerToKiwiExporter is available via the Slicer Catalog (analogous to an App Store for Slicer). To explore its capabiliites, download the latest Slicer release from http://download.slicer.org and follow the instruction on Slicer’s extensive wiki documentation to install the extension.

NAC Brain Atlas exported and loaded into KiwiViewer