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In January, we kicked off a new STTR project with UNC and UCLA to develop new processing methods for studying traumatic brain injury, and announced the release of new 3D viewers as part of the Visible Patient project. To support our growing workload, we welcomed three new individuals to the Kitware team and continue to recruit enthusiastic, motivated people.
We also took some time to focus on the communities that are so important to Kitware. To support our open-source communities, we announced new, free webinars that will focus on the various toolkits and provide an educational resource for the end-users and developers. Geographically closer to home, our New York Kitwareans volunteered at the Regional Food Bank of New York to support our local community.
- The Kitware Communications Team
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 Kitware Wins STTR Award Developing Cutting-Edge Processing Methods to Study TBI
In January, we announced a new NIH STTR award to develop novel neuroimage processing methods for traumatic brain injury (TBI). TBI affects nearly 1.7 million Americans each year, many of whom will require surgical intervention after their injury. Despite the frequency of TBI and the high costs associated with treatment, there is still a lack of adequate analytic tools that provide informative metrics and easy-to-use image analysis capabilities.
Stephen Aylward, Principal Investigator, and Danielle Pace, Project Leader, will collaborate with Dr. Marc Niethammer at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Dr. Jack Van Horn at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on the Phase I project. The team will leverage computational methods for segmenting, registering, and interpreting images that contain large and changing pathologies to better characterize injury, quantify longitudinal changes, predict outcomes, and support patient treatment management. The software resulting from this project will be delivered to clinicians and made freely available for widespread use and future extension within the open-source 3D Slicer application.
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New Webinars Scheduled for 2013!
Free, Focused Courses on Open-Source Toolkits New for 2013, Kitware is launching a series of in-depth webinars on the various open-source toolkits and projects we contribute to in an effort to better serve the communities. More specific than our introductory webinars, which you can view on our website or Vimeo, these new webinars will focus on a particular topic or application and provide end-users and developers with the skills to take the software to the next level.The first round of one-hour webinars, scheduled through April, includes courses on information visualization with VTK, big data analysis with ParaView, building ITK with Raspberry Pi, and building Qt-enabled VTK applications. For more details, such as course descriptions and registration links, visit the Kitware webinars page. If you have any feedback, or there is a course topic you would like to recommend, please email us at kitware@kitware.com.
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Providing Support for the Visible Patient Project
Collaborating with IRCAD to Provide New 3D Visualization Tools
We recently announced the release of 3D mobile viewing applications for the Visible Patient project, which is led by the Research Institute Against Digestive Cancer (IRCAD) in Strasbourg, France. This work, inspired by the PASSPORT project, provides surgeons with 3D anatomies modeled on patient-specific data.
Kitware collaborated with the IRCAD team to provide free, mobile and online visualization tools to view the data in 3D. The Visible Patient project leverages several Kitware-led open-source tools, including Midas, ITK, and VTK, but required customized Visible Patient viewers. To meet this need, we developed three unique viewers with IRCAD for web, Android, and iOS.
This exciting work creates an intuitive tool for individuals looking to explore human anatomy, especially since IRCAD provides free access to a database of 34 anonymous clinical cases. These cases range from full-body to specific anatomical areas such as lungs, heart, liver, pancreas, etc. To explore the Visible Patient project and the new viewers, visit the website.
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Giving Back to the Local Community
Kitwareans Volunteer at the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York
As an open-source software company, community is an important value at Kitware. We take pride in contributing to and growing the communities around open-source software, but we want to make sure that we're also contributing to the community at home. At the end of January, Kitwareans from our Clifton Park office volunteered at the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York. They helped sort donated food items that would end up serving 23 counties in New York state! The day started with an overview of the organization and its mission, and then the volunteers got to work sorting through frozen meat (checking for openings, tears, and quality!) and boxes of paper and plastic goods. By the end of the day, the team had sorted, packed, and labeled dozens of boxes of goods, that would then be delivered over the next week.
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Kitware Welcomes New Team Members
January a Month for New Beginnings
We kicked off 2013 by growing our Kitware Family with new team members in our Clifton Park, NY office. In January, Claudine Hagen and Jake Stookey came on board. Claudine is Kitware's new Director of Finance, and brings extensive experience in providing accounting and auditing services for a wide range of industries. Jake joined Kitware as a Systems Administrator, after spending several years in a similar role at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Next week, we look forward to two new Kitwareans joining the team. Charles Weatherford, a Communications Coordinator, will start at the Clifton Park office and Jamie Snape, an R&D Engineer, will start at our Carrboro, NC office.
We are excited to welcome Claudine, Jake, Charles, and Jamie to the team! With so much going on at Kitware, we are still growing and looking for enthusiastic, focused individuals to join us. Our employment site is a great resource where you can get to know some of our people , explore our culture, investigate our perks, and then apply for one of our open positions. |
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