The 3D Slicer is freely available, open-source software for
visualization, registration, segmentation, and quantification
of medical data.
Development of the Slicer is an ongoing collaboration between
the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Surgical Planning
Lab at Brigham & Women's Hospital, an affiliate of Harvard
Medical School.
The 3D Slicer uniquely integrates several facets of image-guided
medicine into a single environment. It provides capabilities
for automatic registration (aligning data sets), semi-automatic
segmentation (extracting structures such as vessels and
tumors from the data), generation of 3D surface models (for
viewing the segmented structures), 3D visualization, and
quantitative analysis (measuring distances, angles, surface
areas, and volumes) of various medical scans.
We integrated the 3D Slicer with an open MR scanner to
augment intra-operative imaging with a full array of pre-operative
data. The same analysis previously reserved for pre-operative
data can now be applied to exploring the anatomical changes
as the surgery progresses. Surgical instruments are tracked
and used to drive the location of reformatted slices. Real-time
scans are visualized as slices in the same 3D view along
with the pre-operative slices and surface models. The system
has been applied in over 20 neurosurgical cases at Brigham
and Women's Hospital, and continues to be routinely used
for 1-2 cases per week.
