A free hands-on course on open source software tools for biomedical image analysis and visualization
We held a 2-day course at Kitware’s Carrboro branch office in North Carolina focused on open source software tools for biomedical image analysis and visualization. The course was designed for clinical researchers and technologists with biomedical imaging background who are interested in learning and developing ITK, VTK and 3D Slicer. These are open source libraries and platforms widely used in the medical imaging research community. The course was free for all the attendees and it was taught by experts at Kitware. The course was divided into four sessions.
Session 1: “A hands-on introduction to VTK for medical image visualization”
Instructors: Cory Quammen / Ken Martin
Session 2: “A hands-on introduction to ITK for medical image analysis”
Instructors: Matt McCormick / François Budin / Dženan Zukić
Session 3: “A hands-on introduction to Slicer”
Instructors: Andinet Enquobahrie / Sam Horvath / Dženan Zukić
Session 4: “Customizing 3D Slicer”
Instructors: Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin
All the sessions were interactive with the attendees completing exercises on their own development environments. We had a large contingent of professors, researchers and graduate students from local and out-of-state universities, and commercial companies. The attendees were from:
- Case Western Reserve University
- Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center
- Duke University
- Johns Hopkins Medicine
- North Carolina State University
- Oracle
- Renaissance Computing Institute
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- University of Rhode Island
- University of Tennessee Knoxville
- XStrahl Inc.
Course slides and exercises can be found in Courses collection on Kitware’s data management platform powered by Girder.
Here are some pictures from the event:
Based on the comments we gathered, attendees were happy with the hands-on exercises, the opportunity for a one-on-one interaction with the instructors and the well-organized teaching material. Suggestions for future improvements included scheduling longer sessions for participants to work through the exercises and to take a deep dive into some of the technical topics and incorporating short projects as part of the course. These were all great suggestions. We plan to incorporate these in future training courses. If you are interested in Kitware organizing a course on ITK, VTK, 3D Slicer or any one of our other open source platforms, at your institution or one of our branch office in the US or France, please contact us at kitware@kitware.com.