I-DO: A Deformable Organisms framework for ITK

Medical image analysis is an important problem relating to the study of various diseases. Since their introduction to MICCAI in 2001, ”deformable organisms” have emerged as a fruitful methodology with examples ranging from 2D corpus callosum segmentation to 3D vasculature and spinal cord segmentation. Essentially we previously have developed an artificial life framework that complements the geometrical and physical layers of classical deformable models (snakes and deformable meshes) with high-level behavioral and cognitive layers that facilitate anatomically-driven control mechanisms. This paper describes the integration of deformable organisms into the Insight Toolkit (ITK) www.itk.org. In our proposed implementation we attempt to bridge the ITK framework and coding style with deformable organism design methodologies. In the interest of open science, as the framework develops it will serve as a basis for the community to develop new deformable organisms as well as experiment with those recently published by our group. Further, as the design of the ITK Deformable Organisms (I-DO) is highly modular, researchers and developers can exchange components (spatial objects, dynamic simulation engines, image sensors, etc) allowing in the future for fast development of new custom deformable organisms for different clinical applications.