ITK Workshop at the University of Houston

Last week, Zack Galbreath and Matt McCormick went to the University of Houston in Texas to deliver an ITK Workshop on May 15th and take part in a hackathon on May 16th.  The event was hosted by Dr. Badri Roysam, PI of the FARSIGHT Toolkit project.  The FARSIGHT Toolkit makes heavy use of ITK and VTK. 

The workshop was a great success.  Over 25 participants, who came from local research laboratories, local hospitals, and from academic institutions and companies as far away as Indiana and California, took part in the day-long event.  Working from VirtualBox virtual machines with ITK and tutorial material pre-installed, participants learned about the history of ITK and its capabilities, analysis with SimpleITK with IPython notebooks, how to learn ITK through examples, levelset segmentation and registration with the ITKv4 frameworks, how to contribute to ITK, and write an ITK module.

During the hackathon, members of the FARSIGHT lab took part in a Dashboardfest to test the 4.4 release candidate.  Participants submitted Experimental builds to the dashboard, and results were monitored on the lab whiteboard, which was shared with the world via a Google Plus hangout.  A number of new issues were discovered, and patches were created and submitted to the code review site while other issues were reported in the issue tracker.  We also viewed a nice presentation by Murad Megjhani on the application of dictionary learning to the problem of segmentation of microglial arbors.  Zack demonstrated the features of Visomics as a prospective way to help with some of the issues presented, and a bridge with R was discussed to bring in additional statistical tools.

Dashboardfest whiteboard. From left to right: Zack Galbreath, Kedar Grama, Amin Merouane, Yan Xu, Yanbin Lu, Audrey Cheong, Nicolas Rey.  Not shown: Ho Cheung, Prathamesh Kulkarni, Matt McCormick.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health-National Library of Medicine (NIH-NLM), Kitware, and the FARSIGHT team at the University of Houston.