One year ago we opened an office in Lyon, France to better serve our European customers. During this past year we've taught numerous courses to our open-source communities, made our books available on amazon.co.uk, amazon.fr and amazon.de, and provided technology integration services throughout Europe. At this one year mark, we are excited to announce that Dr. Philippe Pébay has joined the Lyon office as the Director of Visualization and High Performance Computing.

We are quite pleased with the success of Kitware SAS and expect continued growth over the next year. To learn more about our products and services, you can contact us at kitware@kitware.fr. Are you an experienced C/C++ developer with strong skills in visualization, image processing and/or data management? Send your resume and cover letter to jobs@kitware.fr to join our team.

Kitware would like to congratulate Dr. Boon Thye Thomas Yeo who has won the Young Scientist Publication Impact Award from MICCAI. Sponsored by Kitware, this award  rewards scientists who are early in their careers and are shaping the medical image analysis field. Dr. Yeo will receive a $1,000 prize for his paper, "Effects of Registration  Regularization and Atlas Sharpness on Segmentation Accuracy" from MICCAI 2007. Honorable mentions go out to the runners up, Dr. Kang Li  and Dr. Paul M. Novotny.

We had a great time at MICCAI this year presenting papers, teaching tutorials, organizing a workshop, co-chairing a session and sponsoring both the conference and this award. Kitware has attended nearly 40 events so far in 2011 - hopefully we've had a chance to meet! Check out our events page to find out where we'll be next. We are always happy to chat about collaboration, consulting, or career opportunities.

The goal of this research effort is to develop a human/machine collaborative system (HMCS) that provides surgeons with an augmented reality (AR) view that fuses a pre-operative MRI model of the prostate, tumor and surrounding tissues with the da Vinci system laparoscopic video, while compensating for non-rigid prostate tissue deformation using intra-operative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) imaging. We hope to show that adding an AR system with intra-operatively updated anatomical models to the robotic system will allow the surgeon to perceive the multimodality information more effectively and thereby perform the prostatectomy with improved accuracy. This project is a partnership between Kitware, the Center for Computer Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC) at Johns Hopkins University and Blue Torch Medical Technologies.

Kitware recently announced free monthly training courses covering our most popular open-source projects: VTK, CMake, ParaView and ITK. Within days of the announcement, all available spots in all scheduled courses through January were claimed. Not wanting to disappoint our community members, we have switched from a "training" format to a "webinar" format using GoToWebinar, allowing us to have up to 100 attendees per session. Registration information for the new webinar courses will be posted in the next few days on the Kitware course site.