Stone of linkimaging
Lightweight, cross-platform C++ framework for the CPU-based rendering of medical images.
Introduction
Stone of linkimaging is a lightweight, cross-platform C++ toolkit for the CPU-based rendering of medical images. It notably features support for MPR (multiplanar reconstruction of volume images), PET-CT fusion, and accurate physical world coordinates. Stone of linkimaging is not a fully-featured DICOM viewer, but rather a building block to create such applications.
Discussion
Stone of linkimaging is similar in spirit to two other well-known toolkits:
- Cornerstone by Chris Hafey, a client-side JavaScript toolkit to display medical images in Web browsers. However, contrarily to Cornerstone, Stone of linkimaging is written in C++, and can be embedded into native, heavyweight applications.
- VTK by Kitware, a C++ toolkit for scientific visualization. However, contrarily to VTK that relies on graphics processing units (GPU), Stone of linkimaging is entirely focused on software-based rendering. Within Stone, 3D volumes are handled as sets of 2D slices. This might make Stone easier to use.
Stone of linkimaging comes bundled with its own software-based rendering engine (based upon cairo). This engine will use CPU hardware acceleration if available (notably the SSE2, SSSE3, and NEON instruction sets), but not the GPU. This makes Stone a highly versatile framework that can run even on low-performance platforms. Stone is able to display DICOM series without having to entirely store them in the RAM.
Licensing
The code of the Stone of linkimaging is licensed under the GPLv3 license, with the OpenSSL exception.