About IGSTK
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The Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) is an open-source foundation for conducting research and developing applications for minimally invasive, image-guided clinical and medical procedures.
A typical image-guided surgery system provides:
- A method for registration of the preoperative image to the physical space of the patient.
- A tracking device for intraoperative localization of instruments.
- A user interface that displays images and the position of instruments.
- A computer workstation that runs the application.
IGSTK meets these needs as a high-level, component-based framework that (1) is open-source, (2) runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers and integrates a multitude of medical devices, (3) is general enough to benefit a wide range of surgical applications, and (4) is supported and used by hundreds of groups around the world, shaping the future of the exciting and growing field of image-guided surgery.
As open source, it is freely available for research and commercial applications. It thereby provides a venue for researchers to distribute the latest algorithms and advancements and for commercial companies to build upon them. The field of image-guided surgery is advancing more rapidly as a result of IGSTK. As a system that operates on multiple computers and with medical devices from a variety of vendors, IGSTK is reducing the time and effort required to establish a new surgical guidance research lab, and allows the research and applications to have the broadest impact in medicine. The proof that IGSTK has achieved these lofty goals is demonstrated by the fact that it has been downloaded thousands of times, is being used in regulatory-approved medical systems throughout the world, and is distributed by vendors with their medical devices. Even more noteworthy and important, a thriving open-source community has developed around IGSTK. That community is extending the toolkit in new and innovative ways, is supporting new users and applications for free because of the community spirit that has developed, and is benefitting via the synergy and expertise they are creating together. The power and importance of this effort is brought home with the realization that all of this work is leading to new methods and procedures for saving patients' lives.
IGSTK was originally funded by an STTR NIBIB/NIH grant for collaboration between Georgetown University and Kitware, Inc. The Phase I efforts took place from May to September 2003, during which the first implementation of the main components and use of the toolkit was developed in example applications. The Phase II work began in October 2004. During this time, the CADDLab at UNC joined the project and contributed SpatialObjects and the RF Ablation application. Shortly thereafter, in 2005 Atamai Inc. joined and contributed the Tracker code. With these recent developments, the IGSTK Iteration 7 was released to the public in January 2006 and in February there was a presentation and demonstration at SPIE Medical Imaging in San Diego, CA. A year later in 2007, IGSTK datasets became available on MIDAS, the IGSTK book was published and IGSTK 2.0 was released. In November 2007, the Phase III grant was awarded by the NIBIB/NIH and IGSTK is currently funded by grant R01 EB00719 with Dr. Kevin Cleary as the principal investigator.
IGSTK 3.0 was released in 2008, with a corresponding presentation and demonstration at SPIE Medical Imaging. Due to the rapid growth of the user community, in February 2009 there was a dedicated IGSTK User Group meeting held at SPIE Medical Imaging, which is now an annual feature of this conference. February 2009 also saw the release of IGSTK 4.0
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