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May was another packed month for Kitware! In addition to some new funding awards in the form of a contract to enhance VTK and not one but two Phase II awards from the Department of Energy for in situ cosmological analysis and developing an HPC simulation framework, we also had two software releases for CMake and ITK. To top it all off, the Kitware team created a slick new interactive infographic using the healthcare cost data recently released by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
We've also had some excitement inside Kitware itself too, as there have been more than a few recent promotions. Head on over to this news article to find out who's moving where; congratulations to all!
-The Kitware Communications Team
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 Further Enhancement of VTKNew NIH Funding Opens the Door to Future Upgrades
We recently announced the award of $2.4 million in research funding from the National Institute of Health to enhance and extend the widely-adopted Visualization Toolkit (VTK). This new award comes after a crescendo of requests from the medical community to adopt the toolkit as a catalyst for interactive visualization research in medicine. As such, this project will update the graphics infrastructure to support the representation and rendering of large data over the web, on mobile platforms, and with interactive 3D widgets. A VTK Extension Manager will also be deployed for easy discovery and download of extensions to VTK.
To learn more about Kitware's open-source software expertise, please visit our medical and scientific computing solution pages.
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Two $1M DOE Phase II Proposals Awarded
From Cosmology to Manufacturing HPC, Kitware is There
In May we announced the award of new Phase II SBIR funding from the United States Department of Energy (DOE) for the continued development of an innovative framework for performing in situ analysis of large-scale cosmological simulations. The team will pursue the development of an in situ analysis library and in situ algorithms for identifying, extracting, and tracking features in large-scale cosmological simulations. Further, the library will be integrated with data management functionality and web-based technologies, which will be developed to simplify data mining and visualization workflows.
We also unveiled a new Phase II SBIR grant from the U.S. Department of Energy for the continued development of an open-source, high-performance computing (HPC) simulation and computation framework. The developed model-centric integration framework enables researchers to select only the toolkits and applications needed to perform a set of simulation, computation, or analysis tasks. The framework will bring critical simulation and capabilities to small to mid-sized manufacturers.
To learn more about Kitware's Scientific Computing capabilities and how it can be leveraged to meet the needs of your organization through custom development and consulting support, please visit our website.
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CMake 2.8.11 Is Now Available
New Version; New Features
On behalf of the global CMake team, Kitware announced the release CMake 2.8.11 on May 17. This new release of CMake features the introduction of Target Usage Requirements and a Generator Toolset Selection for Visual Studio and XCode, as well as a variety of other improvements, including the ability for developers to specify target usage requirements for their consumers, and allowing them to build myexe sources with requirements specified by yourlib with the target_link_libraries(myexe yourlib). There is also a new target include directory and target compile definition commands that offer public, private, and interface options.
For a full list of improvements in the CMake 2.8.11 release, please read the blog post or view all changes in the change log. To get started with the new release, download it from the CMake download page. You can also get involved with CMake by joining the community through the mailing lists, or you can stay up-to-date by following our blog, where we will be featuring some new, detailed articles on CMake.
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Interactive Exploration of CMS Data
National Healthcare Data has Never Looked this Good
Kitware unveiled a new information visualization tool that enables the exploration of hospital costs across the United States. The tool was created in response to the recent release of "Medicare Provider Charge Data," a dataset of pricing information for the top 100 most-billed procedures from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The wide variation in costs for similar procedures at hospitals across the country has sparked considerable controversy; however, it is nearly impossible to gain a deeper understanding of the data while it remains in spreadsheet format. Kitware's Informatics team, inspired by the public's response, developed a web-based, interactive data exploration tool to facilitate further analysis and understanding.
For more information on our hospital costs web application you can visit Kitware's informatics solutions page. This effort is sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory and DARPA XDATA program.
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Announcing ITK 4.4.0
The Newest Version Features Upgrades Aplenty
This past month Kitware and the Insight Toolkit (ITK) team announced ITK 4.4.0! The new release can be downloaded from the ITK website. Major changes made in this release are detailed in this announcement, and a full list of updates and bug fixes can be found on the wiki.
A few of the new enhancements include the addition of the MINC and SCIFIO ImageIO modules, improvements to QuadEdgeMesh processing, a new ImageScanlineIterator, and the beginning of a new API design change aimed to improve the functionality of the GetObject methods. The minimum required CMake version was updated to 2.8.8 on Windows and 2.8.5 on other systems, and this may be increased even higher in the near future to ensure that all CMake features operate correctly.
For even more information on ITK 4.4.0, you can check out this recently recorded webinar or visit the ITK website.
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