Slicer3:About

Vision for Slicer 3 (for biomedical and other users without a computer science background)

Slicer 3 is envisioned as a software platform that is both easy to use for researchers and easy to extend for programmers, while maintaining the high level of functionality needed to support sophisticated science. The NA-MIC engineering core took on the task of designing an architecture for Slicer 3, the broad-strokes requirements of which are:

1. to preserve features of Slicer 2.x that are needed by the user community (comprehensive visualization ability, various modules for segmentation, registration, DTI analysis, volume measurements, ...)
2. to add new functionality desired by the computer science community (ease of adding new modules, ease of interfacing existing to non-slicer software modules, scalability to grid architectures, automated graphical user-interface testing)
3. to design the new platform such that some of the new features requested by the user community (such as undo-redo facility, improved 3D rendered images) are significantly easier to implement.

Some specific features planned in Slicer 3.0 are as follows:

• New 2D GUI widgets with potential for automated testing of GUI functionality, plus high level widgets to support advanced imaging capabilities (e.g., transfer function editor)
• New 3D interaction widgets for direct manipulation and measurement of data
• Lowering the effort to add functionality
• New way to integrate external programs (execution model) as Slicer modules, including ITK
• Improved modularization and plug-in architecture
• Rearchitecture of the data and scene description
• Rearchitecture of the coordinate system structure
• Upwards compatible for the core functionality with Slicer 2.6 from a user perspective
• Easy porting of slicer 2.6 code
• Support Undo/Redo facility for interactive editing
• Usability guidelines to promote software consistency

For users of Slicer 2.6:

• Slicer 3.0 will maintain the core functionality of previous versions, but with a cleaner and more integrated user interface.
• Slicer 3.0 will import scenes from previous versions of Slicer.
• NA-MIC will provide updated tutorials and documentation to help people use Slicer 3.0.
• The Slicer team will be available to help with the transition.