Documentation/Nightly/Announcements

For the latest Slicer documentation, visit the read-the-docs.

Summary

What is 3D Slicer

Slicer Nightly Highlights

Slicer Extensions

Other Improvements, Additions & Documentation

Summary

The community of Slicer developers is proud to announce the release of Slicer Nightly.

• Slicer Nightly introduces
  • an improved App store, known as the extension manager, for adding capabilities to Slicer. More than 50 plug-ins are currently available.
  • close to 400 feature improvements and bug fixes lead to improved performance and stability.
  • augmentation of many modules.

• Click here to download Slicer Nightly for different platforms and find pointers to the source code, mailing lists and bug tracker.
• Please note that Slicer continues to be a research package and is not intended for clinical use. Testing of functionality is an ongoing activity with high priority, however, some features of Slicer are not fully tested.
• The Slicer Training page provides a series of courses for learning how to use Slicer. The portfolio contains self-guided presentation and sample data sets.

The main slicer.org pages provide a guided tour to the application, training materials, and the development community. New users should start there because we try to keep the pages organized and up to date.

What is 3D Slicer

Slicer is a community platform created for the purpose of subject specific image analysis and visualization.

• Multi-modality imaging including, MRI, CT, US, nuclear medicine, and microscopy
• Multi organ from head to toe
• Bidirectional interface for devices
• Expandable and interfaced to multiple toolkits

There is no restriction on use, but permissions and compliance with rules are responsibility of users. For details on the license see here

Slicer Nightly Highlights

• New and Improved Modules
• 

  New LandmarkRegistration interactive registration and inspection.

• 

  New Subject hierarchy module organizes and handles loaded data, providing processing and analysis features through plugins.

• 

  Improved Transforms module with:
  

  • Support non-linear transforms in the module
  • Display of transform information
  • Transform visualization
• 

  New ExtensionsWizard tool deprecating the ModuleWizard.

  • This new tool separates the concepts of extensions and modules, and allows creating an extension containing several modules, as well as adding modules to an existing extension.
  • It allows to publish an extension source code to github.
  • It provides an easy way to create a pull request on the extension index.

• Under the Hood: Improved Toolkits
• 

  Moved from CTK f64b68a to 1c97e54 (499 commits)

• 

  Moved from CTKAppLauncher v0.1.11 to v0.1.14 (43 commits)

• 

  Moved from ITK v4.4.1 to v4.6.0 (1089 commits)

• 

  Moved from OpenIGTLink 66e272d to 849b434 (53 commits)

• 

  Moved from Qt 4.7.4 to Qt 4.8.6

• 

  Moved from VTK v5.10.1 to VTK v6.2.0 (5490 commits)

Slicer Extensions

TODO: Will be generating automatically list.

• New and Improved Extensions
• Foo.png

  Foo for doing awesome stuff.  NEW

Other Improvements, Additions & Documentation

• improved integration of non rigid deformations
• faster image stack (png, jpg, bmp, tiff...) loading
• mrb files

• Improved CLI AutoRun ensuring slice view is not reset when inputs are updated.

• Markups
  • Add slice intersections toggle

Python scripting

• Bundle pydicom python module in Slicer package

• Improve slicer.util python module.

• Improve VTK adding support for additional observer CallDataType. See here for details.

• TODO: Add reference to VTKv6 blog posts

For Developers: Looking at the Code Changes

From a git checkout you can easily see the all the commits since the time of the 4.4.0 release:

git log v4.3.0..HEAD

To see a summary of your own commits, you could use something like:

git log v4.3.0..HEAD  --oneline --author=pieper

see the git log man page for more options.

Commit stats and full changelog