Main Page/SlicerCommunity

3D Slicer Enabled Research

3D Slicer is a free open source software package distributed under a BSD style license for analysis, integration, and visualization of medical images. 3D Slicer allows even those with limited image processing experience to effectively explore and quantify their imaging data for hypothesis-driven research.

The community that relies on 3D Slicer is large and active: (numbers below updated on October 20^st, 2021)

• 957,896+ downloads in the last 10 years (173,891+ in last year)
• over 14,300+ literature search results on Google Scholar
  • 8,560+ cancer
  • 4,620+ brain
  • 3,590+ lung
  • 2,270+ breast
  • 2,040+ prostate

• 1,200+ papers on PubMed citing the Slicer platform paper
  • Fedorov A., Beichel R., Kalpathy-Cramer J., Finet J., Fillion-Robin J-C., Pujol S., Bauer C., Jennings D., Fennessy F.M., Sonka M., Buatti J., Aylward S.R., Miller J.V., Pieper S., Kikinis R. 3D Slicer as an Image Computing Platform for the Quantitative Imaging Network. Magnetic Resonance Imaging. 2012 Nov;30(9):1323-41. PMID: 22770690. PMCID: PMC3466397.

• 35+ events in open source hackathon series continuously running since 2005 with 3012 total participants
• Slicer Forum with 4,576 subscribers has approximately 275 posts every week

The following is a sample of the research performed using 3D Slicer outside of the group that develops it. (Research performed by groups that are also actively developing 3D Slicer is represented in the publication database).

• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015
• 2011-2014
• 2000-2010

We invite you to provide information using our discussion forum on how you are using 3D Slicer to produce peer-reviewed research. Information about the scientific impact of this tool is helpful in raising funding for the continued support.

We monitor PubMed and related databases to update these lists, but if you know of other research related to the Slicer community that should be included here please email: marianna (at) bwh.harvard.edu.