Maverick

Overview

Maverick is an extensive collection of C++ classes, parameter files, specifications, and documentation for (a) defining workflows whereby complex tasks are reduced to a sequence of simple tasks, (b) presenting workflows using Trolltech’s Qt graphical user interface environment, (c) managing representations of physical objects in a scene, (d) rendering scenes, and (e) calling internal and external modules to process a scene at each stage of the workflow.

Maverick is useful for end-users and developers. It can be used to rapidly define new applications or to integrate advanced image analysis methods into existing applications. Maverick contains a set of standard applications, those applications can be tailored by Kitware to meet a customer’s specific needs, and Maverick can be made available as a set of libraries that can be used by other developers to build new applications or to extend existing applications.

One of the major strengths of Maverick is that it embodies decades of image analysis expertise gathered from the top researchers at Kitware. The same scientists who lead the development of ITK (www.itk.org) and VTK (www.vtk.org) have developed Maverick to reduce the expertise needed to apply advance image analysis and visualization algorithms to real-world data. Their expertise allows Maverick applications to have a simple workflow interface and a few intuitive, high-level options with which novice users can accomplish complex image segmentation and registration tasks with ease.

To understand the important of image analysis expertise in designing an application, consider the following. Many segmentation tasks actually involve a complex sequence of ITK filters for pre-processing the data, performing the segmentation based on initializations provided by the user, post-processing the results, and then offering those results for the user to edit. Each of those steps may be accomplished to varying degrees of efficacy by any of a number filters and interaction styles, and each of those steps may contain a multitude of parameters. Nevertheless, with experience and knowledge, most segmentation tasks can be reduced to having the user set one or two high-level parameters, if the imaging modality and target organ is known a priori. This is the philosophy used throughout Maverick and its modules.

Applications

• Maverick/Merlin
• Maverick/Jester
• Maverick/Slider

Utilities

• Maverick/VisibleManTxtToMhd
• Maverick/MultipleVolumesToVolume
• Maverick/ImageMath
• Maverick/MetaImageImporter
• Maverick/DICOMSeriesImporter

Modules

• Maverick/RegisterImages
• Maverick/PDFSegmenter
• Maverick/SmoothLabels