ITK 4.0 is Now Available and Ready for Download!
Kitware, on behalf of the ITK team, is pleased to announce the release of ITK 4.0.0 and the availability of the binaries, which are now available for download on the ITK download page. This release is the outcome of 18 months of refactoring efforts, generously sponsored by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) with funds provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
New features included in ITK 4.0.0 include modularization, a simplified accessibility layer called “SimpleITK,” new frameworks for registration and level setting, a newly-refactored finite element (FEM) framework, video processing support, updated DICOM support based on GDCM 2.0, and improved support for large microscopy images above 4 GB.
A general code cleanup of the toolkit also took place, focusing on supporting modern C++ compilers and removing code intended for obsolete ones. The ITK development process was also revamped for version 4 through migration to Git, adoption the code review tool Gerrit, and development of a new process for dealing with testing data.
The Insight Journal, ITK’s open-access journal for medical image processing and visualization, was also adapted to take advantage to the new tools provided in ITK 4.0. The toolkit adopted the Apache 2.0 License as a replacement for the BSD license. Wrap ITK has additionally been integrated into the modularized tree for Python and Java bindings. Doxygen documentation generation has been improved for groups and modules, wiki example links, diagrams, and a crowdsourcing tool for creating Gerrit patches from a web interface.
The release of ITK 4.0 marks a historical event for the ITK community. It was made possible by a large, collaborative team of developers who are fully listed on the ITK Wiki. The code swarm video below shows the contributions to and growth of ITK 4.0.
TKv4 Release 4.0.0 from Kitware on Vimeo.
The Insight Toolkit (ITK) was developed in 1999 with funding from the NLM. Since then, it has grown to more than two million lines of code from 164 active contributors with an average of 9.2 commits per day.
Information on migrating to ITK 4.0 and obtaining and submitting documentation can be found on the blog. For additional information on ITK and how it can improve your medical image processing workflow, please contact Kitware@kitware.com.