AUTHOR=Lowekamp Bradley C., Chen David T., Ibanez Luis , Blezek Daniel
TITLE=The Design of SimpleITK
JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neuroinformatics
VOLUME=Volume 7 - 2013
YEAR=2013
URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroinformatics/articles/10.3389/fninf.2013.00045
DOI=10.3389/fninf.2013.00045
ISSN=1662-5196
ABSTRACT=SimpleITK is a new interface to the Insight Segmentation and
Registration Toolkit (ITK) designed to facilitate rapid prototyping, education
and scientific activities, via high level programming
languages. ITK is a templated C++ library of image processing
algorithms and frameworks for biomedical and other applications, and
it was designed to be generic, flexible and extensible. Initially, ITK
provided a direct wrapping interface to languages such as Python and
Tcl through the WrapITK system. Unlike WrapITK, which exposed ITK's
complex templated interface, SimpleITK was designed to provide an easy
to use and simplified interface to ITK's algorithms. It includes
procedural methods, hides ITK's demand driven pipeline, and provides a
template-less layer. Also SimpleITK provides practical conveniences
such as binary distribution packages and overloaded operators. Our
user-friendly design goals dictated a departure from the direct
interface wrapping approach of WrapITK, towards a new facade
class structure that only exposes the required functionality, hiding
ITK's extensive template use. Internally SimpleITK utilizes a manual
description of each filter with code-generation and advanced C++
meta-programming to provide the higher-level interface, bringing the
capabilities of ITK to a wider audience. SimpleITK is licensed as
open source software under the Apache License Version 2.0 and more information
about downloading it can be found at http://www.simpleitk.org.