Software development effort within MIPG dates back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first ever software package for 3D medical image visualization and analysis was brought out in 1980 by MIPG [1] and subsequently upgraded and distributed worldwide with source code [2] before the term “open source” was coined for software exchange. With the advent of computer workstations, these early packages were substantially expanded and implemented on the newer machines.
3DVIEWNIX [3]: A data-, machine-, and application independent software system for the visualization and analysis of multidimensional images, released in 1993, was a UNIX and X-windows based software system for the interactive visualization, manipulation, processing, and analysis of multidimensional, multimodality image data. This system has been distributed to 100s of sites worldwide and to 191 sites with source code. Several specialized packages have been developed based on this system for specific medical applications over the years.
CAVASS [4] is the most recent in the lineage of software MIPG developed and distributed. It subsumes 3DVIEWNIX. Additionally, its implementation is for Windows, UNIX, and Linux and is parallelized for compute intensive operations to work on computer clusters in a portable manner.
[1] Udupa, J.K.: Display - A system
of programs for two- and three-dimensional display of medical objects
from CT data, Technical Report MIPG41, Medical Image Processing
Group, Department of Computer Science, SUNY/Buffalo, Buffalo, New
York, 1980 (112 pages).
[2] Udupa, J.K.: DISPLAY82 - A system of
programs for the display of 3D information in CT data, Technical
Report MIPG67, Medical Image Processing Group, Department of
Radiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, April 1983 (205
pages).
[3] Udupa, J.K. Odhner, D., Samarasekera, S., Goncalves,
R., Iyer, K., Venugopal, K., and Furuie, S.: 3DVIEWNIX: An open,
transportable, multidimensional, multimodality, multiparametric
imaging software system, SPIE Proceedings,2164:58-73, 1994.
[4] Grevera, G., Udupa,
J.K., Odhner, D., Zhuge, Y., Souza, A., Iwanaga, T. and Mishra, S.:
CAVASS: A computer-assisted visualization and analysis software
system, Journal of Digital Imaging, 20:
101–118. 2007.
CAVASS
and 3DVIEWNIX can be downloaded from the following site:
[CAVASS]: Released Version for Windows platform. We do not have a Windows installer for CAVASS at this time. On most Windows platforms the package can be extracted and run in place. (Do not remove cavass.exe from the Release folder; you can create a shortcut to cavass.exe and move the shortcut to the desktop or other location.) It may be necessary to install a runtime library: download VC_redist.x64.exe and run it.
[CAVASS]: Source code; there is also a file linux-install-notes.txt in the source bundle with instructions for installing under OpenSUSE Linux or Ubuntu.
[3DVIEWNIX]: A data-, machine-, and application- independent software system for the visulization and analysis of multidimensional images, source code; user manual.
