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<br/>Registration Toolkit (ITK) designed to facilitate rapid prototyping, education<br/>and scientific activities, via high level programming<br/>languages. ITK is a templated C++ library of image processing<br/>algorithms and frameworks for biomedical and other applications, and<br/>it was designed to be generic, flexible and extensible. Initially, ITK<br/>provided a direct wrapping interface to languages such as Python and<br/>Tcl through the WrapITK system. Unlike WrapITK, which exposed ITK's<br/>complex templated interface, SimpleITK was designed to provide an easy<br/>to use and simplified interface to ITK's algorithms. It includes<br/>procedural methods, hides ITK's demand driven pipeline, and provides a<br/>template-less layer.   Also SimpleITK provides practical conveniences<br/>such as binary distribution packages and overloaded operators. Our<br/>user-friendly design goals dictated a departure from the direct<br/>interface wrapping approach of WrapITK, towards a new facade<br/>class structure that only exposes the required functionality, hiding<br/>ITK's extensive template use. Internally SimpleITK utilizes a manual<br/>description of each filter with code-generation and advanced C++<br/>meta-programming to provide the higher-level interface, bringing the<br/>capabilities of ITK to a wider audience. SimpleITK is licensed as<br/>open source software under the Apache License Version 2.0 and more information<br/>about downloading it can be found at http://www.simpleitk.org.