Introduction

Feature Highlights

Slicer 3.4, is the official release as of May 2009

Features include:

• Welcome Module at Startup
• Improved Save Module
• Improved Editor
• New Registration module
• New Slices module
• Fiducial based tractography
• Improved SceneSnapshot Screen Capture functionality
• Compare View and Cross Hairs
• Support for Extension Server for installing plug-ins
• Improved Dicom Support
• MRML scenes and all data load from and save into XNAT desktop

You may download different versions of Slicer3 and find pointers to the source code, mailing lists and 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 Slicer3 are not fully tested.

3D Slicer consists of more than over a million lines of code, mostly C++. This massive software development effort has been enabled by the participation of several large scale NIH funded efforts, including the NA-MIC, NAC, BIRN, CIMIT and NCIGT communities. The funding support comes from several federal funding sources including NCRR, NIBIB, NIH Roadmap, NCI, NSF and the DOD as well as others.

Portal pages on this website have been designed for end users and developers.

Slicer executables and source code are available under a BSD-style, free open source licensing agreement under which there are no reciprocity requirements, no restrictions on use, and no guarantees of performance. Slicer leverages a variety of toolkits and software methodologies that have been labeled the NA-MIC kit. Please click here to read more about the NA-MIC kit.

History: Slicer was initiated as a masters thesis project between the Surgical Planning Laboratory at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1998. Slicer has been downloaded many thousand times. A variety of publications were enabled by the Slicer software. A new, completely rearchitected version of Slicer was developed and has been released in 2007. In May of 2008 version 3.2 of Slicer has been released.

Slicer and Image-Guided Therapy

See Pace et al. MR-guided Prostate Interventions with 3D Slicer and the NA-MIC Kit. 2009 for more info.

With IRB clinical protocols appropriately created and managed, Slicer has been used in clinical research. In image-guided therapy research, Slicer is frequently used to construct and visualize collections of MRI data that are available pre- and intraoperatively to allow for the acquiring of spatial coordinates for instrument tracking. In fact, Slicer has already played such a pivotal role in image-guided therapy, it could be thought of as growing up alongside that field.

Slicer provides a graphical user interface to interact with the data. In addition to manual segmentation and the creation of 3D surface models from conventional MRI images, Slicer has also been used for non-rigid image registration and to incorporate models of the neurovascular bundle using image segmentation in MRI-guided prostate interventions.