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.

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.

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.

Many thanks to Dr. Terry Peters for inviting us to the recent Slicer3D workshop, held at UWO today, in conjunction with the J. P. Robarts Research Institute.  The workshop was a hands-on tutorial of a pre-release version of Slicer3D from an end-user's perspective followed by an introduction to the application from a developer's perspective.  Since both VTK and ITK are exposed directly via both TCL and Python wrappers, the application is a pretty short putt from what we've worked on in the past.  We'll continue to examine Slicer3D for visualization opportunities.