It's been some months since we blogged about MicroView, and it's high time that we updated our community on its development status -- never fear, development continues on unabated.  We've been mostly focusing on improving MicroView's core stability (hence the "beta" label on recent releases), but we've had some time to work on new tools as well.  We've added a number of image filters to MicroView, including median and anisotropic smoothing; the GPU-accelerated volume renderer gained some usability improvements and volume cropping; a new DICOM-push tool has been added; the basic ROI selection tool now can rotate ROI primitives; and finally, we've integrated an experimental shell into MicroView.  The shell allows you to work with images using either VTK's python wrappers or Numpy's array interface.  We have a few ideas, internally, on how a shell like this can be used, but we can't wait to find out what MicroView power-user's can do with this.  If you find a use for it, don't forget to drop us an email to let us know.

Step-and-shoot respiratory or cardiac gated images are readily available from many Cone beam geometry microCT scanners on the market today.  While admittedly the simplest method to acquire multiphase image data, step-and-shoot scan methods can spend upwards of 50% of the scan time simply accelerating and decelerating gantry equipment.  A free-running acquisition mode, on the other hand, accelerates the gantry only at the beginning and end of the scan, so less time is wasted.  One downside of this free-running mode, however,  is that acquired raw image data needs to be sorted according to phase prior to image reconstruction, and there's little or no guarantee that images will be acquired at precisely the correct phase at all.  Based on recently published methods, we've been experimenting with a post-scan retrospective gating method implemented on the GE Locus Ultra preclinical scanner, and the image above demonstrates an example result:  10 phases were reconstructed automatically using our GPU reconstruction engine, running on our custom workstation.  The total scan acquisition time was 50 seconds, during which time the CT scanner made 10 full rotations.  The total reconstruction time was 86 seconds.  While our initial goal is to produce a turn-key third-party solution for the Ultra scanner, there's no reason why this can't be extended to other hardware platforms - we'll be investigating other scanners, which don't currently have such gating options, in the upcoming months.

We’ll be at the 2013 World Molecular Imaging Congress in Savannah, Georgia this month.  If you are at the conference, be sure to drop by booth 312 to see our latest offerings.

Also, one of the featured sessions at this year's conference is "The Relationship Between Radiology and Molecular Imaging".  We've had some experience with adding radiation therapy capabilities to micro-CT scanners.  So, if this is an area of interest for you, please stop by to chat after the session. 

MicroView development continues with additional features being added with each alpha release.  While developing MicroView our primary focus has always been  analytic tool development, especially for microCT applications.  However, we recently took some time to complete the porting of Tkinter widgets found in older versions of MicroView to the newer wx interface that we're sporting in 2.5.0.  Completing this task allows us to re-examine a number of the open-source plugins in MicroView that we think need some attention, and we've started by rethinking volume rendering.  Based on the high-quality GPU-accelerated rendering code base found in recent versions of VTK, this renderer is significantly faster than the original renderer found in MicroView.  We believe it's also easier to use.  These days, GPU-accelerated volume rendering is pretty much a requirement for any visualization package if it wants to be taken seriously, so it's nice to check this off the development list.


If you've got a fairly decent NVidia or ATI GPU, give it a try and let us know your experiences.

Parallax Innovations is pleased to preview another cutting-edge product – the CT Sabre.  The CT Sabre is a robotic arm that fits inside the bore of a micro-CT scanner and is controlled remotely through software, allowing you to perform procedures, such as the delivery of therapeutic agents, biopsies, blood sampling, etc.

You can operate the arm during fluoroscopy:
✔ Full control of needle position
✔ Live view of needle under robotic control
✔ Highly accurate needle positioning
✔ Control of animal position
✔ Full control of x-ray angle

Alternatively, you can plan an intervention from a reconstructed 3D volume:
✔ Plan trajectory of needle with full anatomical information
✔ Easy-to-use, interactive planner – point and click to define trajectory
✔ No need to re-position the animal between acquisition and intervention

Safe and effective interventions for:
  ✔ Cardiac perfusion
  ✔ Biopsy
  ✔ Tissue injection
  ✔ Cannulation
  ✔ Blood sampling

If you have any questions or comments about the CT Sabre, we would love to hear from you.  Also, continue to watch this blog for future CT Sabre updates.

For those into numerology, tonight's release of MicroView may be especially auspicious:  we've just uploaded the 13th alpha release of MicroView 2.5.0, with well over 600 bug fixes and improvements since we began the new stream of development.  Coincidentally, our build number decided to play along with the theme (you can check it for your self by looking at the 'About...' box in MicroView).

On a more serious note, this release is the first to contain universal binaries for OS X (32-bit and 64-bit Intel architectures).  It also is one of the first releases to showcase our new thoughts on managing multiple images simultaneously.

As always, you can find the latest MicroView binaries here.  Happy
Hallowe'en to everyone.

MicroView 2.5.0 alpha10 is now available from our website for win32, win64 and OSX platforms.  The Mac version no longer requires X, which is helpful if you run Mountain Lion 10.8.  There's two new plugins to try out, as well as the return of the basic bone analysis app.  Let us know what you think.  See http://www.parallax-innovations.com/microview for all download links to this pre-release version.

We've just relaunched our website, with a fresh new look, and tighter integration with our blog.  The original blogger.com site will continue to work for a while, but anyone linking to it is encouraged to switch to using our new blog location.