A new press release from Kitware, makers of CMake, ParaView, VTK, ITK, and lots of popular scientific visualization toolkits, announces that they just got a grant from the NIH to push forward in the biomedical space.
Historically, VTK been indirectly funded by the development of related applications such as ParaView. This new award comes after a crescendo of requests from the VTK community to reinvigorate the toolkit as a catalyst for interactive visualization research in medicine. As such, this project will update the graphics infrastructure to support the representation and rendering of large data over the web, on mobile platforms, and with interactive 3D widgets.
I’m excited to see those last few pieces in there: large data over the web and on mobile platforms. It looks like Kitware could really be positioning themselves as the frontrunner in high-end scientific visualization in almost all industries (Web, Mobile, Desktop, and HPC).
via Kitware – News: Kitware to Enhance the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) to Accelerate Community-Driven Medical Innovation.
Science kitware, medical, nih, vtk
Kitware is preparing their training courses for the fall, and is now accepting registrations for a new VTK development course in September. The objects look simple enough:
1. Understand data structures, readers and filters – how they work and how to write new ones
2. Understand interaction and widgets – how they work and how to incorporate them into your programs
3. Discover how to control the way data is displayed with rendering and charts
4. Learn how to put these pieces together to make fully-featured applications with Qt
Full details are on their site. As someone who spent a the first 6 months muddling through VTK at my last job, something like this is a great value for getting up-to-speed under tutelage of the experts.
via Kitware Professional Training Courses.
Science education, kitware, training, vtk
This week Kitware announced a new partner library for ITK and VTK that brings tubular segmentation and registration support to the community at large.
A guiding premise of TubeTK is that by focusing on 1D and 2D manifolds we can devise methods that are insensitive to the modality, noise, contrast, and scale of the images being analyzed and to the arrangement and deformations of the objects in them. In particular, we propose that TubeTK’s manifold methods offer improved performance for many applications, compared to methods involving the analysis of independent geometric measures (e.g., edges and corners) or requiring complete shape models.
Tubular segmentation is big-business in the biomedical space, isolated out blood vessels and other organs within larger structures. Surely they’ll be the first big users of this library, but eventually it could come to a huge variety of fields.
via TubeTK.
Science itk, kitware, tubetk, vtk
If you’ve always wanted to know more about VTK or Paraview but haven’t had the time, or haven’t been able to convince your management to spring for paid training, Kitware has heard your complaints.
Kitware is pleased to announce the availability of free online courses in support of its open-source communities. The courses, designed to give new and beginning users the skills and knowledge required to effectively use these open-source tools, will provide an introduction to the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), CMake, ParaView, and the Insight Toolkit (ITK). Each 90-minute course will cover one toolkit and be taught by an expert Kitware instructor.
You can hit their Training website and see the “Upcoming Online Courses” to see the list. They’ll be offering at first one class a month, with the first “Intro to VTK” coming up on October 12th.
via Kitware – News: Free Online Courses Now Available.
Science education, kitware, paraview, training, vtk
Everyone’s favorite visualization library VTK has just gotten another major upgrade. The new 5.8 release offers lots of new features including:
- Improved Unicode Support
- OpenGL accelerated 2D Charts like Pie Charts & Histograms
- Support for Polyhedron Cells
- A new GPU based Mapper for Glyphs
- Integration of HDF5 1.8.5
- Much more…
Go hit their site to download it and check it out.
Kitware – News: VTK 5.8.0 Released.
Science vtk
Kitware’s VTK was one of the lucky selections in this year’s “Google Summer of Code”, and they’re now accepting applications for lots of different little projects in everyone’s favorite visualization API. A few of them so far (check out the full list here)
- iPad/iPhone Support for ParaView
- WebGL Volume Rendering
- Protovis in C++
- IEEE VisWeek2010 Algorithms
- AMR Volume Rendering
And lots more..
Kitware – News: Visualization Toolkit Selected for Google Summer of Code.
Science google, kitware, vtk
Last week we were able to interview Berk Geveci, Kitware’s Director of Scientfic Computing, about Kitware’s dedication to open source computing and their popular VTK and ParaView products. Berk now leads a team of 18-20 people focused on high performance computing scientific visualization and, more recently, informatics and information visualization.
Kitware is approximately 12 years old, and started as a research company around the Visualization Toolkit (VTK). The business model is founded on supporting and consulting on open-source software, tho now they have 5 differenct groups on various interests. Berk runs the Scientific visualization group, but they also have groups on computer vision, medical imaging and computing, data publication, and software processes like CMake and CDash.
During the course of the interview we discussed how Kitware deals with open-source and proprietary technologies, their government and industry collaborations, and what we might see in the next version of these popular products.
Read the interview after the break.
Read more…
Science feature, interview, kitware, paraview, vtk
Boston University is running a free week-long tutorial series on Scientific Visualization and High Performance Scientific Computing that includes introductions to Scientific Visualization and training on tools like ParaView and VTK.
In addition to covering concepts, techniques, and tools which researchers may use in their own computing environments, these tutorials are designed to help you make effective use of the Boston University Scientific Computing Facility and its related scientific visualization resources.
Full details are available on their site, but most of the SciVis tutorials are today and tomorrow.
via Scientific Computing and Visualization Summer Tutorial Series » TechWeb » Boston University.
Science education, paraview, tutorials, vtk
VTK, the premiere data visualization library, has just released verion 5.4.2 with improved readers for Fluent and other changes. Various memory leaks and UI glitches have been fixed, and the code is all online and ready for download.
You can read the complete changelog after the break.
Kitware – News.
Read more…
Science api, kitware, library, vtk
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