Research Platform

The Medical Imaging Interaction Toolkit (MITK) is a free open source software (FOSS) platform for medical image analysis. MITK aims at providing support for an efficient software-development of methods and applications dealing with medical images.

The scope of MITK application comprises the broad range from the implementation and evaluation of custom research work, like e.g. algorithms, to the development of entire solutions for clinical studies or commercial use.

MITK is not limited to medical image processing tasks supporting medical diagnosis, but can also be used to support the development of therapy planning, and imaged-guided therapy applications.

MITK can be used at three distinctive levels to meet the above requirements:

• At the toolkit level MITK supplements the de-facto standards Insight Toolkit (ITK) and Visualization Toolkit (VTK) with concepts for interactive applications, such as a central data repository, synchronized 2D and 3D rendering of this repository, interactive manipulation of images or derived data, and a set of useful GUI widgets.
• At the application framework level MITK offers an infrastructure for end-user applications based on the OSGi inspired C++ component framework BlueBerry. This application framework can be easily configured for your own special requirements and extended with plugins at all levels of the application.
• At the application level MITK is distributed with an application called ExtApp, which allows medical end-users to perform regular image processing tasks such as visualization of 3D and 3D+t images, rigid and deformable fusion (registration) of multiple image volumes, or interactive organ segmentation. For a downloadable end-user application based on this see http://3m3.mitk.org.

MITK is actively developed by researchers and engineers of mint medical and of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. MITK and MITK based applications are used by industrial companies, technical and clinical research groups, and physicians world-wide. The MITK team encourages users of MITK applications and the platform to improve our software by means of our public mailing list, an open bug tracking system, and a public overview of the continuous integration process.