Author
Luis Ibanez
Other affiliations: Google
Bio: Luis Ibanez is an academic researcher from Kitware. The author has contributed to research in topics: Software & Software development process. The author has an hindex of 19, co-authored 50 publications receiving 1834 citations. Previous affiliations of Luis Ibanez include Google.
Papers
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University of Wisconsin-Madison1, University of Konstanz2, National Institutes of Health3, Kitware4, University of California, Santa Barbara5, University of California, San Diego6, Carnegie Mellon University7, Howard Hughes Medical Institute8, National Institute of Standards and Technology9, University of Houston10, University of California, San Francisco11, University of Dundee12, Max Planck Society13, Massachusetts Institute of Technology14
TL;DR: Each computational step that biologists encounter when dealing with digital images, the inherent challenges and the overall status of available software for bioimage informatics are reviewed, focusing on open-source options.
Abstract: Representative members of the bioimage informatics community review the computational steps and some of the primary software tools available to biologists who are acquiring and analyzing microscopy-based digital image data, with a focus on open-source options. Few technologies are more widespread in modern biological laboratories than imaging. Recent advances in optical technologies and instrumentation are providing hitherto unimagined capabilities. Almost all these advances have required the development of software to enable the acquisition, management, analysis and visualization of the imaging data. We review each computational step that biologists encounter when dealing with digital images, the inherent challenges and the overall status of available software for bioimage informatics, focusing on open-source options.
499 citations
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TL;DR: SimpleITK is a new interface to the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) designed to facilitate rapid prototyping, education and scientific activities via high level programming languages, bringing the capabilities of ITK to a wider audience.
Abstract: SimpleITK is a new interface to the Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK) designed to facilitate rapid prototyping, education and scientific activities via high level programming languages. ITK is a templated C++ library of image processing algorithms and frameworks for biomedical and other applications, and it was designed to be generic, flexible and extensible. Initially, ITK provided a direct wrapping interface to languages such as Python and Tcl through the WrapITK system. Unlike WrapITK, which exposed ITK's complex templated interface, SimpleITK was designed to provide an easy to use and simplified interface to ITK's algorithms. It includes procedural methods, hides ITK's demand driven pipeline, and provides a template-less layer. Also SimpleITK provides practical conveniences such as binary distribution packages and overloaded operators. Our user-friendly design goals dictated a departure from the direct interface wrapping approach of WrapITK, toward a new facade class structure that only exposes the required functionality, hiding ITK's extensive template use. Internally SimpleITK utilizes a manual description of each filter with code-generation and advanced C++ meta-programming to provide the higher-level interface, bringing the capabilities of ITK to a wider audience. SimpleITK is licensed as open source software library under the Apache License Version 2.0 and more information about downloading it can be found at http://www.simpleitk.org.
458 citations
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TL;DR: With increasing research on system integration for image‐guided therapy (IGT), there has been a strong demand for standardized communication among devices and software to share data such as target positions, images and device status.
Abstract: Background With increasing research on system integration for imageguided therapy (IGT), there has been a strong demand for standardized communication among devices and software to share data such as target positions, images and device status.
301 citations
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TL;DR: The multiple tools, methodologies, and practices that the ITK community has adopted, refined, and followed during the past decade, in order to become one of the research communities with the most modern reproducibility verification infrastructure are described.
Abstract: Reproducibility verification is essential to the practice of the scientific method. Researchers report their findings, which are strengthened as other independent groups in the scientific community share similar outcomes. In the many scientific fields where software has become a fundamental tool for capturing and analyzing data, this requirement of reproducibility implies that reliable and comprehensive software platforms and tools should be made available to the scientific community. The tools will empower them and the public to verify, through practice, the reproducibility of observations that are reported in the scientific literature.Medical image analysis is one of the fields in which the use of computational resources, both software and hardware, are an essential platform for performing experimental work. In this arena, the introduction of the Insight Toolkit (ITK) in 1999 has transformed the field and facilitates its progress by accelerating the rate at which algorithmic implementations are developed, tested, disseminated and improved. By building on the efficiency and quality of open source methodologies, ITK has provided the medical image community with an effective platform on which to build a daily workflow that incorporates the true scientific practices of reproducibility verification.This article describes the multiple tools, methodologies, and practices that the ITK community has adopted, refined, and followed during the past decade, in order to become one of the research communities with the most modern reproducibility verification infrastructure. For example, 207 contributors have created over 2400 unit tests that provide over 84% code line test coverage. The Insight Journal, an open publication journal associated with the toolkit, has seen over 360,000 publication downloads. The median normalized closeness centrality, a measure of knowledge flow, resulting from the distributed peer code review system was high, 0.46.
214 citations
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TL;DR: IGSTK is an open source C++ software library that provides the basic components needed to develop image-guided surgery applications and the IGSTK team is following several key strategies to build an active user community.
Abstract: This paper presents an overview of the image-guided surgery toolkit (IGSTK). IGSTK is an open source C++ software library that provides the basic components needed to develop image-guided surgery applications. It is intended for fast prototyping and development of image-guided surgery applications. The toolkit was developed through a collaboration between academic and industry partners. Because IGSTK was designed for safety-critical applications, the development team has adopted lightweight software processes that emphasizes safety and robustness while, at the same time, supporting geographically separated developers. A software process that is philosophically similar to agile software methods was adopted emphasizing iterative, incremental, and test-driven development principles. The guiding principle in the architecture design of IGSTK is patient safety. The IGSTK team implemented a component-based architecture and used state machine software design methodologies to improve the reliability and safety of the components. Every IGSTK component has a well-defined set of features that are governed by state machines. The state machine ensures that the component is always in a valid state and that all state transitions are valid and meaningful. Realizing that the continued success and viability of an open source toolkit depends on a strong user community, the IGSTK team is following several key strategies to build an active user community. These include maintaining a users and developers’ mailing list, providing documentation (application programming interface reference document and book), presenting demonstration applications, and delivering tutorial sessions at relevant scientific conferences.
87 citations
Cited by
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TL;DR: An overview of 3D Slicer is presented as a platform for prototyping, development and evaluation of image analysis tools for clinical research applications and the utility of the platform in the scope of QIN is illustrated.
4,786 citations
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TL;DR: ImageJ2 as mentioned in this paper is the next generation of ImageJ, which provides a host of new functionality and separates concerns, fully decoupling the data model from the user interface.
Abstract: ImageJ is an image analysis program extensively used in the biological sciences and beyond. Due to its ease of use, recordable macro language, and extensible plug-in architecture, ImageJ enjoys contributions from non-programmers, amateur programmers, and professional developers alike. Enabling such a diversity of contributors has resulted in a large community that spans the biological and physical sciences. However, a rapidly growing user base, diverging plugin suites, and technical limitations have revealed a clear need for a concerted software engineering effort to support emerging imaging paradigms, to ensure the software’s ability to handle the requirements of modern science. We rewrote the entire ImageJ codebase, engineering a redesigned plugin mechanism intended to facilitate extensibility at every level, with the goal of creating a more powerful tool that continues to serve the existing community while addressing a wider range of scientific requirements. This next-generation ImageJ, called “ImageJ2” in places where the distinction matters, provides a host of new functionality. It separates concerns, fully decoupling the data model from the user interface. It emphasizes integration with external applications to maximize interoperability. Its robust new plugin framework allows everything from image formats, to scripting languages, to visualization to be extended by the community. The redesigned data model supports arbitrarily large, N-dimensional datasets, which are increasingly common in modern image acquisition. Despite the scope of these changes, backwards compatibility is maintained such that this new functionality can be seamlessly integrated with the classic ImageJ interface, allowing users and developers to migrate to these new methods at their own pace. Scientific imaging benefits from open-source programs that advance new method development and deployment to a diverse audience. ImageJ has continuously evolved with this idea in mind; however, new and emerging scientific requirements have posed corresponding challenges for ImageJ’s development. The described improvements provide a framework engineered for flexibility, intended to support these requirements as well as accommodate future needs. Future efforts will focus on implementing new algorithms in this framework and expanding collaborations with other popular scientific software suites.
4,093 citations
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Technische Universität München1, ETH Zurich2, University of Bern3, Harvard University4, National Institutes of Health5, University of Debrecen6, University Hospital Heidelberg7, McGill University8, University of Pennsylvania9, French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation10, University at Buffalo11, Microsoft12, University of Cambridge13, Stanford University14, University of Virginia15, Imperial College London16, Massachusetts Institute of Technology17, Columbia University18, Sabancı University19, Old Dominion University20, RMIT University21, Purdue University22, General Electric23
TL;DR: The Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark (BRATS) as mentioned in this paper was organized in conjunction with the MICCAI 2012 and 2013 conferences, and twenty state-of-the-art tumor segmentation algorithms were applied to a set of 65 multi-contrast MR scans of low and high grade glioma patients.
Abstract: In this paper we report the set-up and results of the Multimodal Brain Tumor Image Segmentation Benchmark (BRATS) organized in conjunction with the MICCAI 2012 and 2013 conferences Twenty state-of-the-art tumor segmentation algorithms were applied to a set of 65 multi-contrast MR scans of low- and high-grade glioma patients—manually annotated by up to four raters—and to 65 comparable scans generated using tumor image simulation software Quantitative evaluations revealed considerable disagreement between the human raters in segmenting various tumor sub-regions (Dice scores in the range 74%–85%), illustrating the difficulty of this task We found that different algorithms worked best for different sub-regions (reaching performance comparable to human inter-rater variability), but that no single algorithm ranked in the top for all sub-regions simultaneously Fusing several good algorithms using a hierarchical majority vote yielded segmentations that consistently ranked above all individual algorithms, indicating remaining opportunities for further methodological improvements The BRATS image data and manual annotations continue to be publicly available through an online evaluation system as an ongoing benchmarking resource
3,699 citations
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TL;DR: This is the first study to use a consistent transformation framework to provide a reproducible evaluation of the isolated effect of the similarity metric on optimal template construction and brain labeling, and to quantify the similarity of templates derived from different subgroups.
3,491 citations
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TL;DR: The entire ImageJ codebase was rewrote, engineering a redesigned plugin mechanism intended to facilitate extensibility at every level, with the goal of creating a more powerful tool that continues to serve the existing community while addressing a wider range of scientific requirements.
Abstract: ImageJ is an image analysis program extensively used in the biological sciences and beyond. Due to its ease of use, recordable macro language, and extensible plug-in architecture, ImageJ enjoys contributions from non-programmers, amateur programmers, and professional developers alike. Enabling such a diversity of contributors has resulted in a large community that spans the biological and physical sciences. However, a rapidly growing user base, diverging plugin suites, and technical limitations have revealed a clear need for a concerted software engineering effort to support emerging imaging paradigms, to ensure the software's ability to handle the requirements of modern science. Due to these new and emerging challenges in scientific imaging, ImageJ is at a critical development crossroads.
We present ImageJ2, a total redesign of ImageJ offering a host of new functionality. It separates concerns, fully decoupling the data model from the user interface. It emphasizes integration with external applications to maximize interoperability. Its robust new plugin framework allows everything from image formats, to scripting languages, to visualization to be extended by the community. The redesigned data model supports arbitrarily large, N-dimensional datasets, which are increasingly common in modern image acquisition. Despite the scope of these changes, backwards compatibility is maintained such that this new functionality can be seamlessly integrated with the classic ImageJ interface, allowing users and developers to migrate to these new methods at their own pace. ImageJ2 provides a framework engineered for flexibility, intended to support these requirements as well as accommodate future needs.
2,156 citations