Interaction concept

Interaction is an important part for image based medical applications. This is true for intervention planning, assistance systems for medical interventions, for manual and semi-automatic segmentation as well as to adjust automatic processes for segmentation or registration tasks. MITK has a new, generic interaction concept to structure and by that standardize the manipulation of data and artificial objects in 2D and 3D views.

Interactions are reactions of the software on user input. Since their many types of input devices (e.g., graphics tablets, tracking systems, etc.), the first step to standardize is to create abstract events out of device dependent events. The next step is to interpret the meaning of the event, which often depends on the state of the software. Even the rather simple case of building a polygon and subsequently interacting with it has multiple states (building-in-progress, point-is-selected, point-is-being-moved, etc.). MITK's unique interaction concept is organized by hierarchically defined state machines and allows to describe and configure states and state-transitions in a consistent way in XML-files, which are loaded during run-time.

That way it is possible to load different interaction behavior used in familiar medical manufacturer software (e.g. Siemens Syngo, Philips Easy Vision, GE Advantage).

Furthermore it is possible to easily adapt the behavior to specific applications and workflows.

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