Documentation/Nightly/Announcements

From Slicer Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Home < Documentation < Nightly < Announcements


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




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 plug-ins to Slicer. More than 50 plug-ins and packages of plug-ins are currently available.
    • Close to 400 feature improvements and bug fixes have resulted in improved performance and stability.
    • Improvements to many modules.
  • Click here to download Slicer Nightly for different platforms and find pointers to the source code, mailing lists and the 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 tutorials and data sets for training in the use of Slicer.

slicer.org is the portal to the application, training materials, and the development community.

What is 3D Slicer

3D Slicer is:

  • A software platform for the analysis (including registration and interactive segmentation) and visualization (including volume rendering) of medical images and for research in image guided therapy.
  • A free, open source software available on multiple operating systems: Linux, MacOSX and Windows
  • Extensible, with powerful plug-in capabilities for adding algorithms and applications.

Features include:

  • Multi organ: from head to toe.
  • Support for multi-modality imaging including, MRI, CT, US, nuclear medicine, and microscopy.
  • Bidirectional interface for devices.

There is no restriction on use, but Slicer is not approved for clinical use and intended for research. Permissions and compliance with applicable rules are the responsibility of the user. For details on the license see here

Slicer Nightly Highlights

DICOM

  • Improved DICOM support and user experience
    • Added 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 meta-data (header) viewer
    • Auto-examine in dicom browser added by providing two modes: Advanced and Non-advanced mode.
    • Added repair tool for DICOM database

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 any transforms as glyphs, grid, or contours in 2D slice and 3D views - click here for demo video
  • Computing and applying inverse transforms, compositing any number of transforms
  • Real-time update: if the transform (or any visualization parameter) is changed then the visualization is updated immediately (interactive visualization while editing the transform)
  • 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

Colors

  • Improved Colors module user interface
    • Added support to display continuous color scales
    • Added an option to use color names as labels on the scalar bar

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

Extensions removed

  • DataStore: The module is now bundled in the regular Slicer distribution.
  • PathPlanner and VisualLine: Module PathXplorer available in SlicerIGT extension provides similar functionality.
  • PlusRemote: Moved PlusRemote module under SlicerIGT extension. Because PlusRemote depends on SlicerIGT, and is always used together with the other SlicerIGT modules.
  • TransformVisualizer: The feature has been moved to the Slicer core. See Transforms module.

Extensions renamed

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

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.

Other

  • Help / Report a bug: Application error/warning/debug log messages are now saved to file. Added option to copy/paste log file contents of recent Slicer sessions to bug reports.

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

Related Projects