NLM Announces First Complete Major Release of SimpleITK

NLM Announces First Complete Major Release of SimpleITK. NLM Tech Bull. 2017 May-Jun;(416):b3.

[Editor's Note: This is a reprint of an announcement published on the NLM Web site on April 1, 2016. To be notified of announcements like this subscribe to the NLM-Announces email list.]

Hailing it as a significant milestone, enabling a broad range of domain scientists to perform complex image-analysis tasks without requiring advanced software skills, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHC) announces the first complete major release of SimpleITK.

SimpleITK is a simplified multi-language interface to the NLM Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). By providing a simplified interface to ITK, it enables researchers and domain scientists who are novice software developers to benefit from the image-analysis capabilities of ITK. For researchers who are experienced software developers, the toolkit facilitates rapid prototyping and evaluation of image segmentation and registration workflows with minimal programming effort. In the educational setting SimpleITK's concise interface allows students to experiment with well-known algorithms, enhancing their understanding of algorithm performance without the need for advanced software engineering skills. The toolkit has been used in courses taught at leading universities including amongst others Carnegie Mellon University, University College London, University of Iowa, and University of British Columbia.

The development process follows best software engineering practices including code reviews and continuous integration testing, with results displayed online allowing everyone to gauge the status of the current code and any code that is under consideration for incorporation into the toolkit. User support is available through a dedicated mailing list and the project Wiki. SimpleITK is available for the following programing languages: Python, R, Java, C#, C++, Lua, Ruby, and TCL. Binary versions of the toolkit are available for the GNU Linux, Apple OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Additional details are available from the project site http://www.simpleitk.org/, with all of the source code freely available on GitHub under an Apache-2.0 license.

This multiple-language-binding, scripting version of ITK is created, developed, and maintained within the NLM LHC by the Office of High Performance Computing and Communications staff.