ITK Spring Workshop Trilogy (2) @ University Of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The second stop of our ITK Spring workshop series is University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Cory Quammen from the Computer Science Department of UNC was our local host. We have about 45~50 attendees in total, who are mostly researchers and graduate students from the Biomedical Research Imaging Center, the Biostatistics Department and the Neuro Image Analysis and Research Lab of UNC. A small group from the Biomedical Engineering Department of Duke University joined us as well.

Luis Ibanez introduces ITK at UNC

Similar to our previous Montreal workshop, we started a dynamic agenda of step-by-step exercises of ITK filtering and  image registration.  The diversity of experience in the crowd makes it hard to synchronize the pace of the hands-on activities. We encouraged people to pair up to work through each challenges and allow them to work at their own pace.  For some of the researchers who have been developing medical image analysis software using ITK for years, they cruise through the exercises fairly easily. For those who had never done any C++ programming before, it took a little bit learning time to follow the CMake and compilation steps.  SimpleITK IPython Notebook examples seems to be new to the majority of the attendees. Since those IPython examples are self-guided/explained, we didn’t encounter as many questions as we expected.

After the workshop, Cory and Sean kindly demoed several cool visualization and simulation projects that they have been working on, and they made sure Matt and Luis experienced the famous virtual reality Pit.

Cory literally gives Matt a hand in the virtual reality Pit.

Luis smiles as he remodels 3D pediatric airway models.  Disclaimer: no actual babies were butchered by Luis’ (lack of) surgical skills in this demonstration.

On the following day, we participated in a productive hackathon.  Cory fixed bugs in the SCIFIO module used to read microscopy images.  Matt worked on preparations for the release of ITK 4.4.0.  Luis help Pei Zhang submit his first patch, which allowed Pew-Tian Yap to follow soon after.  Xiaoxiao helped Jian Cheng organize his code into an ITKv4 module.

This event was sponsored by The National Institutes of Health-National Library of Medicine (NIH-NLM),  The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Kitware, Inc.