ITK/About

About the Insight Toolkit

The Insight Toolkit (ITK) is an open-source software toolkit for performing registration and segmentation. Segmentation is the process of identifying and classifying data found in a digitally sampled representation. Typically the sampled representation is an image acquired from such medical instrumentation as CT or MRI scanners. Registration is the task of aligning or developing correspondences between data. For example, in the medical environment, a CT scan may be aligned with a MRI scan in order to combine the information contained in both.

ITK is implemented in C++. ITK is cross-platform, using the CMake build environment to manage the compilation process. In addition, an automated wrapping process generates interfaces between C++ and interpreted programming languages such as Tcl, Java, and Python (using CableSwig). This enables developers to create software using a variety of programming languages. ITK's C++ implementation style is referred to as generic programming (i.e., using templated code). Such C++ templating means that the code is highly efficient, and that many software problems are discovered at compile-time, rather than at run-time during program execution.

Because ITK is an open-source project, developers from around the world can use, debug, maintain, and extend the software. ITK uses a model of software development referred to as extreme programming. Extreme programming collapses the usual software creation methodology into a simultaneous and iterative process of design-implement-test-release. The key features of extreme programming are communication and testing. Communication among the members of the ITK community is what helps manage the rapid evolution of the software. Testing is what keeps the software stable. In ITK, an extensive testing process (using Dart) is in place that measures the quality on a daily basis. The ITK Testing Dashboard is posted continuously reflecting the quality of the software.