Featured Software: SMIViewer - A simple yet powerful platform for your volume analysis!

So if you haven't already seen SMIViewer, it is a volume analysis software. Here is a screen shot:

We interviewed the creator of SMIViewer and we would like to share it here on radRounds.
Tell us about yourself and about your group I am a researcher/developer working in medical imaging for past 5 years or so. Science.Medical.Imaging (http://groups.google.com/group/medicalimagingscience) is a group that originated with the goal of bringing people form a variety of backgrounds together, and ultimately to share resources for improved health care via accessible research. Having been in medical imaging research/development for some time, I felt the need for a consolidated effort from people with expertise in Radiology, Computer Science, Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, and even Arts (for effective presentation or visualization). Usually the trend is for people to approach a problem primarily with knowledge of their own domain; e.g. a computer scientist, when approaching a problem for a new clinical application, might not come up with the best clinical solution. Likewise, a clinical expert might not always come up with the best and most stable computer solution for his/her problem. So I discussed this with a friend, and we came up with the idea of creating a group that will do just that: share ideas, and resources with a diverse community towards a common goal: improved health care.
What let you / your group to create SMIViewer? SMIViewer originated as an effort to provide the research community with a framework that would allow them to prototype and add their own clinical applications quickly. The final goal is to provide a solid visualization and user interaction framework (that a computer scientist may do comfortably) that would work on most consumer PCs (personal computers), and users (clinical experts) can plug-in their own algorithms developed on SMI Software Development Kit (SMISDK). Of course the current revision of SMIViewer is less than 2 months old and the SDK is still not open source, and it does not do all that we aim at, we are moving towards its final goal slowly. For now, the viewer can load most DICOM 3.0 compliant image/volume data sets, and allows the user to interact with 3 orthogonal MPR (multi planar reformat) representations and a 3D Volume Rendering display interactively. Version 1.0.0.5 onwards also supports basic tissue segmentation operations. SMISDK is not public yet either, but it is in the plans to make it open source at some point: when it has become stable enough. Also please note that SMIViewer or SMISDK is in no way competing with any similar existing commercial or free system; it is just an attempt to fill the gaps between people with a wide range of expertise (engineers, clinicians, mathematicians, physicists, biologists, etc.).
What clinical or research success >stories/applications can you tell us? Unfortunately SMIViewer is so young, we do not have any clinical or research stories about it to share. It has not been tested in a clinical environment, as we are promoting it primarily as a research only tool. Once SMISDK becomes opensource, it should allow clinical users to build their own applications for research.
What is in the future for SMIViewer? SMIViewer is just one of the many gifts the Science.Medical.Imaging group is planning to give to the community. Our plan is to stabilize the viewer with most of the data loading and visualization options, and then release the SMISDK along with it. This will allow users to plugin their own applications quickly without worrying about many data formats and visualization. We also plan to collaborate with GDCM (http://www.creatis.univ-lyon1.fr/Public/Gdcm/Main.html) project to keep enhancing our DICOM data handling capabilities.
Download a copy of SMIViewer here.