ITK/Roadmap 2005 2006
ITK Roadmap
The future developement of ITK relies heavily on feedback from the community of users and developers as well as guidelines from the clinical and medical research community.
This page is intended to gather feedback regarding the future direction of ITK and in particular to list specific features and functionalities that would make the toolkit more useful for the medical imaging community.
Features and Functionalities
Software Engineering
Explicit Instantiations
This will improve compile time and will reduce the size of libraries and binaries
Typeless layer
A C++ typeless layer will provide users with a toolkit where the pixel type and dimension of the image do not have to be decided in advance. This layer will look very close to what VTK uses for representing images and imaging filters.
Adopting Dart2
Dart2 will bring a large number of interesting features that will improve the quality control system for ITK. We should plan the transition from Dart to Dart2 in a progressive and organized way.
Increasing Code Coverage
Code coverage is low for a significan number of files. It is usually correlated with the less used classes in the toolkit
Increasing Valgrind/Purify Testing
Testing for run-time problems has received reduced attention. As ITK move more and more into applications, we should pay closer attention to the run-time correctness of the code. We should setup more machines for running Valgrind/Purify testing
Since these builds take longer, we could take advantage here of Dart2 new alternative periodicity. For example, run these tests on a weekly or montly basis and then enter in sessions for cleaning up the code.
Deprecation Policy
Image Modalities
A variety of image modalities are now well supported in ITK at this point. New image modalities may become important for the medical research community and later on for the clinical users. This section list the upcoming image modalities, their relevance and what would it take to support them in ITK. Note that the categories are not independent and that some of them will overlap.
