Documentation/Nightly/Announcements

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Nightly


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 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.
  • New Compare Volumes supports an overview of one or more volumes in the scene.

  • DICOM

    • Improve DICOM support user experience
      • Add a way to change the table densities in three levels: compact, cozy and comfortable.
      • Re-arranged the patient, study and series search box so that the search box will be on the top of tables for both horizontal and vertical cases.
      • Resize tables based on contents.
      • Allow users to acknowledge all DICOM loading errors with a single click
      • Add DICOM header viewer

    Transforms

    • Improved integration of non rigid deformations, including grid (displacement field) and bspline transforms
    • Interactive application of non rigid deformations to volume slices, models, markups
    • Visualization of non rigid deformations as glyphs, grid, or contours in 2D and 3D views
    • Detailed transform information display (type of transform, basic properties, displacement at current position)
    • Loading/saving of oriented bspline transforms with or without additive bulk component
    • Loading/saving of oriented grid transforms
    • Loading/saving of transforms in h5 file format

    Markups

    • Improved Markups module user interface
      • Add slice intersections toggle
      • Add right click option to copy markups list
      • Add coordinates to right click menu

    Editor

    • Add a Sphere option to the PaintEffect to make it quicker to segment large anatomical regions that are somewhat spherical.
    • Paint using pixel mode if brush size is too small
    • Button effect are checked/unchecked based on the 'effect' property stored in the parameter node

    Extensions Manager

    • Add search box
    • Add 'More' link
    • Load extension icon from disk
    • Implement downloading of extension icons
    • Install extension dependencies
    • Add mechanism to check for extensions updates

    Slicer Extensions

    TODO: Will be generating automatically list.

    Other Improvements, Additions & Documentation

    Optimization

    • Improve Rendering pipeline performance optimizing observations management
    • Reduce memory footprint (Fix memory leaks)
    • Reduce installer size
    • Faster image stack (png, jpg, bmp, tiff...) loading

    Rendering / Visualization

    • Add Multi-sampling option
    • Improved scalar bar to allow displaying of annotations in conjunction with labels.
    • Slice Annotations: enhance the DataProbe module providing an easy way to show/hide/customize corner annotations, ruler and color bar in the Slice viewers.

    CLI / SlicerExecutionModel

    • Improved CLI AutoRun ensuring slice view is not reset when inputs are updated.
    • In developer mode do not remove CLI input and output files
    • Reduce the chance of crashes when CLI returns result images

    Python scripting

    • Add support for real Qt resources in Python. See r23290 for details.
    • Improve VTK event support adding a way to specify the CallData type. See here for details.
    • Bundle pydicom python module in Slicer package
    • Add helper methods to ScriptedLoadableModuleLogic for managing parameter nodes
    • SelfTest: Add clickAndDrag() method to the scripted module. It allows to send synthetic mouse events to the specified widget (qMRMLSliceWidget or qMRMLThreeDView)
    • Improve slicer.util python module.
      • Add modulePath(moduleName) method
      • Add resetThreeDViews/resetSliceViews
      • Add VTKObservationMixin
      • Add getFirstNodeByClassAndName()
      • Add NodeModify context manager: It allows to easily disable modified event associated with a node, and automatically re-enable them and invoking them if it applies.
    • TODO: Add reference to VTKv6 blog posts

    Other

    • Help / Report a bug: Added option to copy log file contents


    For Developers

    Under the hood

    • Add support for user-defined stereo-viewing options
    • Build-system
      • Improve support for Visual Studio 2013
      • Refactor management of external project launcher settings. See r23724
      • Add option Slicer_ITKV3_COMPATIBILITY. This option enabled by default will allow (if disabled) to build Slicer with ITKv3 compatibility later disabled and ITK_USE_64BITS_IDS enabled.



    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

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