Towards a Visual Programming Environment Based on ITK for Medical Image Analysis

Medical image analysis experiments usually require a certain level of programming skills and are often time-consuming. Visual programming can address these issues by providing a high-level user interface to visually access and combine underlying medical image analysis functionalities. This paper describes the ITKBoard, an extension of the Insight Toolkit for Registration and Segmentation (ITK). Unlike traditional approaches, ITKBoard, a visual tool for experimentation and prototyping, allows rapid visual construction of filter pipelines, via a graphical user interface. An overview of the main functionalities and the system design is presented in this paper. The approaches that we have developed to resolving critical issues such as pipeline handling, automatic object wrapping and plugin mechanism are discussed in detail. This is a first step towards a visual programming environment designed for medical image analysis, in which the specific needs in terms of visual data-flow and control-flow programming will be progressively addressed. It is envisaged that when the software is released in the near future it will be significantly beneficial to the medical image analysis community.