An extensible imaging platform for optical imaging applications

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has recently developed an extensible imaging platform (XIP), a new open-source software development platform. XIP can be used to rapidly develop imaging applications designed to meet the needs of the optical imaging community. XIP is a state-of-the-art set of visual 'drag and drop' programming tools and associated libraries for rapid prototyping and application development. The tools include modules tailored for medical imaging, many of which are GPU hardware accelerated. They also provide a friendlier environment for utilizing popular toolkits such as ITK and VTK, and enable the visualization and processing of optical imaging data and standard DICOM data. XIP has built-in functionality for multidimensional data visualization and processing, and enables the development of independently optimized and re-usable software modules, which can be seamlessly added and interconnected to build advanced applications. XIP applications can run "stand alone", including in client/server mode for remote access. XIP also supports the DICOM WG23 "Application Hosting" standard, which will enable plug-in XIP applications to run on any DICOM host workstation. Such interoperability will enable the optical imaging community to develop and deploy modular applications across all academic/clinical/industry partners with WG23 compliant imaging workstations.