Brain Morphometry BIRN — Visualization Tools
3D Slicer (Slicer 3)
3D Slicer is a visualization software package that was developed at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) in Boston. It can be used to display MR images, derived DTI data, and derived data from FreeSurfer analysis. 3D Slicer can be downloaded here.
A major upgrade to the underlying 3D-Slicer architecture is underway that marks the transition of critical functionality from the currently .6 release of 3D Slicer to that of the open-source version 3.0. More detail about the development of this new version is described here.
Slicer 3 includes a port of the diffusion tensor (DTMRI) module to the Slicer3 framework. The BWH group expects this new version to be available by the second half of 2007. Slicer3 already includes a GE-developed utility to convert proprietary GE DICOMs of DWI scans into mBIRN-standard NRRD format. BWH is working with JHU and MGH to provide similar functionality for Philips and Siemens versions of the same.
FreeSurfer interoperability porting to the Slicer3 environment is nearly complete, and has been demonstrated as part of the Query Atlas project. The Query Atlas is functionality within Slicer that displays information about the brain region that is currently under the mouse cursor. This new feature will facilitate interactive exploration of the data. In addition, BWH plans to include a service running in the background that will perform web queries based on the current mouse location. The expected scenario is that when the mouse pointer “hovers” over a structure the Query Atlas will run in the background and bring up relevant literature and reference material. The user will be able to augment and refine the anatomy-based search using keywords about the clinical condition of the subject and the scan type and protocol.
DTI Studio
DTI Studio is a Windows-based software package, developed at Johns Hopkins University for the processing and visualization of diffusion tensor data. The package supports a number of different image data types from Philips PAR and REC files to DICOM. DTI Studio can be obtained from the S. Mori group website here. The package is supported through a user list here (Lee, link to: http://lists.mristudio.org/mailman/listinfo/dtistudio-users) as well as by the developers (dtistudio@mri.jhu.edu).