2015.02.01 SlicerMaintenance LettersOfSupport

Dear Slicer and PLUS community,

Gabor Fichtinger and I are writing a grant proposal that is requesting NIH funding to support the continued development, maintenance, and distribution of 3D Slicer and the PLUS toolkit.

The title of our proposal is:
"Slicer+PLUS: Collaborative, open-source software for ultrasound analysis."

With the funding going to Kitware (me and JC), Queen's University (Gabor Fichtinger, Tamas, and Andras), Isomics (Steve Pieper), BWH, and many others, this proposal is meant to keep not only the software, but also the outstanding communities of Slicer and PLUS thriving for the next four years. The proposal uses the goal of adding real-time ultrasound RF signal processing into Slicer as its "moon shot." In general, it seeks to improve our support of GPU-based methods, custom workflows, and third party software integration. Our goal is to make certain that Slicer and PLUS continue to evolve as our community's research needs evolve.

To make our proposal a success, we need your help! Please take a few minutes to send us a letter of support for our proposal! To make it easy for you to show your support, we have drafted five sample letters:

1. File:2015.02.01-Draft1-SlicerSupporter.docx
2. File:2015.02.01-Draft2-SlicerSupporter short.docx
3. File:2015.02.01-Draft3-SlicerAndPLUSSupporter.docx
4. File:2015.02.01-Draft4-LowCostUltrasoundSupporter.docx
5. File:2015.02.01-Draft5-PlusSupporter.docx

We need your letters of support by February 1, 2015! You can send your letter to me as a PDF document or simply as text in an email. My email address is
stephen.aylward@kitware.com

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me or Gabor.

Best regards,

Stephen Aylward
Kitware, Inc.