3D Slicer

3D Slicer is a multi-platform, free open source software (FOSS) for visualization and image computing. The navigation box on the left leads to additional pages with more information. Slicer is natively designed to be available on multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and Mac Os X.

3D Slicer consists of more than 550 thousand lines of code, mostly C++. This massive software development effort has been enabled by the participation of several large scale NIH funded efforts, including the NA-MIC, NAC, BIRN, CIMIT and NCIGT communities. The funding support comes from several federal funding sources including NCRR, NIBIB, NIH Roadmap, NCI, NSF and the DOD as well as others.

Slicer executables and source code are available under a BSD-style, free open source licensing agreement under which there are no reciprocity requirements, no restrictions on use, and no guarantees of performance. Slicer leverages a variety of toolkits and software methodologies that have been labeled the NA-MIC kit. Please click here to read more about the NA-MIC kit.

History: Slicer was initiated as a masters thesis project between the Surgical Planning Laboratory at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1998. Slicer has been downloaded many thousand times. A variety of publications were enabled by the Slicer software. A new, completely rearchitected version of Slicer was developed and has been released in 2007. In May of 2008 version 3.2 of Slicer has been released.

Slicer and Image-Guided Therapy

With IRB clinical protocols appropriately created and managed, Slicer has been used in clinical research. In image-guided therapy research, Slicer is frequently used to construct and visualize collections of MRI data that are available pre- and intraoperatively to allow for the acquiring of spatial coordinates for instrument tracking. In fact, Slicer has already played such a pivotal role in image-guided therapy, it could be thought of as growing up alongside that field.

In addition to producing 3D models from conventional MRI images, Slicer has also been used to present information derived from fMRI (using MRI to assess blood flow in the brain related to neural or spinal cord activity), DTI (using MRI to measure the restricted diffusion of water in imaged tissue), and electrocardiography. For example, Slicer's DTI package allows the conversion and analysis of DTI images. The results of such analysis can be integrated with the results from analysis of morphologic MRI, MR angiograms and fMRI.