ITKv4: The New ITK

The Insight Toolkit (ITK) will be going through a refactoring process this year. The main goals of the refactoring process are:

• Revise
• Simplify
• Accelerate
• Improve DICOM support

In order to address these challenges, the National Library of Medicine has put together a team of six contractors that will be collaborating in refactoring ITK. This new version of ITK will be in the 4.0 series and we refer to it simply as ITKv4. The release of ITK 3.20 will be the stable and reliable release offered to users during the time that ITKv4 is being developed.

In this refactoring, ITK will be improving its support for domain fields beyond radiology. In particular, we will be working closely with application developers in the fields of:

• Microscopy
• Remote Sensing
• Computer Vision

Providing better support for these domains will require the need to introduce changes and improvements in ITK for fundamental features such as:

• Support for very large images (larger than 4 Gigabytes)
• Support for muti-channel images
• Additional File Formats (LSM, TIFF variations, JPEG2000, among others)

Information about the modifications to ITK will be disseminated following the “Release Early, Release Often” golden rule of Open Source software development.

We have started with an initial clean up of the toolkit, following the migration plan described in:
http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK_Release_4/Migration_Plan

and schematically described here:
 

http://www.itk.org/Wiki/File:ITKv4-TransitionPlanProposal.png

As you can see, one of the first steps, have been to move from CVS to Git. You can now clone ITK by following these instructions: http://www.itk.org/Wiki/ITK/Git

We are looking forward to working with the larger community of ITK users to make sure that ITKv4 is a useful and powerful resource for many different applications.