www.slicer.org

• Slicer Wiki

• About Slicer
  • Home
  • Introduction
  • Acknowledgments
  • Contact Us
• Resources
  • Download Slicer
  • For Users
  • For Developers
  • Commercial Use
  • Publication DB
  • Image Gallery
  • Slicer Community
  • Source Code
  • License
  • Mailing Lists
  • Web Archive

Introduction

Slicer, or 3D Slicer, is a free, open source software package for visualization and image analysis. 3D Slicer is natively designed to be available on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac Os X.

Slicer 3.2, is the official release as of June 2008 Features include: Sophisticated complex visualization capabilities Multi-platform support: pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux Scene snapshots allow capture of all visualization parameters of a scene Extensive support for IGT and diffusion tensor imaging Advanced registration / data fusion capabilities Comprehensive I/O capabilities 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.

Integrated Volume Rendering: View of the abdominal atlas

Example of Volume Rendering Bone and large vessels are volume rendered.

3D Slicer consists of more than 550 thousand 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

A quantitative comparison of DECS and fMRI mapping techniques. See Larsen et al. 2007 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.

In addition to producing 3D models from conventional MRI images, Slicer has also been used to present information derived from fMRI (using MRI to assess blood flow in the brain related to neural or spinal cord activity), DTI (using MRI to measure the restricted diffusion of water in imaged tissue), and electrocardiography. For example, Slicer's DTI package allows the conversion and analysis of DTI images. The results of such analysis can be integrated with the results from analysis of morphologic MRI, MR angiograms and fMRI.