GIMIAS is a workflow

Workflow

A workflow consists of a sequence of connected steps. It is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, a group of persons, an organization of staff, or one or more simple or complex mechanisms. Workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work...

-oriented environment focused on biomedical image computing and simulation

Computer simulation

A computer simulation, a computer model, or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system...

. The open source

Open-source software

Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...

 framework is extensible through plug-ins and is focused on building research and clinical software prototypes. Gimias has been used to develop clinical prototypes in the fields of cardiac imaging and simulation, angiography imaging and simulation, and neurology

Neurology

Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue,...

GIMIAS is being funded by several national and international projects like cvREMOD, euHeart or VPH NoE.

About GIMIAS

GIMIAS stands for Graphical Interface for Medical Image Analysis and Simulation. GIMIAS provides a graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 with all main data IO, visualization and interaction functions for images, meshes and signals. GIMIAS features include:

• DICOM browser and PACS
  Picture archiving and communication system
  A picture archiving and communication system is a medical imaging technology which provides economical storage of, and convenient access to, images from multiple modalities . Electronic images and reports are transmitted digitally via PACS; this eliminates the need to manually file, retrieve, or...
  
   connection
• Support for different imaging modalities
• Biomedical data visualization in 2D and 3D: multiplanar reformation, ortho slice view, multi slice view, volume rendering
  Volume rendering
  In scientific visualization and computer graphics, volume rendering is a set of techniques used to display a 2D projection of a 3D discretely sampled data set.A typical 3D data set is a group of 2D slice images acquired by aCT, MRI, or MicroCT scanner....
  
  , X-ray rendering, maximum intensity projection
  Maximum intensity projection
  In scientific visualization, a maximum intensity projection is a volume rendering method for 3D data that projects in the visualization plane the voxels with maximum intensity that fall in the way of parallel rays traced from the viewpoint to the plane of projection...
  
  
• Several input and output formats: DICOM, vtk, stl, Nifty, Analyze.
• Movie control: play, pause, speed control
• Multiple data objects: 2D DICOM images, 3D images, surface meshes, volumetric meshes, signals or annotations
• Image and surface mesh annotations: landmarks, measurements and regions of interest
• Clinical workflow navigation that can help the user to navigate from patient data to useful information for patient treatment.
• Other additional tools for image segmentation, mesh manipulation and signal navigation.

GIMIAS is a development framework that allows developers to create their own medical applications using different plug-ins that can be dynamically loaded and combined. The prototypes developed on GIMIAS can be verified by end users in real scenarios and with real data at early development stages.

Is developed using C++

C++

C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...

 language, has a plug-in architecture, and is cross-platform

Cross-platform

In computing, cross-platform, or multi-platform, is an attribute conferred to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms...

 by means of the standard CMake

CMake

CMake is a cross-platform, open-source system for managing the build process of software using a compiler-independent method. It is designed to support directory hierarchies and applications that depend on multiple libraries, and for use in conjunction with native build environments such as Make,...

 tool. Is possible to integrate new libraries using CSnake tool and is based on common open source libraries like VTK

VTK

The Visualization Toolkit is an open-source, freely available software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization. VTK consists of a C++ class library and several interpreted interface layers including Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python. Kitware, whose team created and continues to...

, ITK

ITK

ITK may stand for:* Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a Canadian organisation representing Inuit* Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit, an extensible open source image segmentation and registration software library...

, MITK, BOOST and wxWidgets

WxWidgets

wxWidgets is a widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces for cross-platform applications. wxWidgets enables a program's GUI code to compile and run on several computer platforms with minimal or no code changes...

. A plug-in can extend the framework adding new processing components, GUI components like toolbars or windows, new data processing types or new rendering libraries.

GIMIAS supports several types of plug-ins, starting from a simple DLL, a 3D Slicer compatible command line plug-in or a more complex GIMIAS plug-in with customized graphical interface. Automated GUI generation and extensible data object model allow to share plug-ins with other frameworks and empower interoperability.

The software is available on Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

 and Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

, 64 bits and 32 bits

32-bit

The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....

.

Image gallery

History

Initial versions of the open source framework was released by the end of 2009 (GIMIAS 0.6.15 was released on October of 2009).

In 2010, more effort was done to empower the open source framework itself, providing more functionality like workflow manager, 3D Slicer plug-in compatibility, signal viewer and customizable views. GIMIAS version 0.8.1, 1.0.0, 1.1.0 and 1.2.0 were released during this year.

GIMIAS Team have collaborated with:

• cmgui team: to trial the use of the interim cmgui API from the GIMIAS software platform
• CTK group
• B3C group (MAF)

GIMIAS is one of the tools used in the Virtual Physiological Human

Virtual Physiological Human

The Virtual Physiological Human is a methodological and technological framework that, once established, will enable collaborative investigation of the human body as a single complex system...

.

Clinical Prototypes

• AngioLab is a software tool developed within the GIMIAS framework and is part of a more ambitious pipeline for the integrated management of cerebral aneurysms. AngioLab currently includes four plug-ins: angio segmentation, angio morphology virtual stenting and virtual angiography. In December 2009, 23 clinicians completed an evaluation questionnaire about AngioLab. This activity was part of a teaching course held during the 2nd European Society for Minimally Invasive Neurovascular Treatment (ESMINT) Teaching Course held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. The Automated Morphological Analysis (angio morphology plug-in) and the Endovascular Treatment Planning (stenting plug-in) were evaluated. In general, the results provided by these tools were considered as relevant and as an emerging need in their clinical field.

• CardioLab: The CardioLab suite for GIMIAS allows to perform an entire workflow from medical images to characterization and quantification of myocardial diseases and Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) planning.

• FocusDET: Accurate localization of epileptogenic foci in intractable partial epilepsy is essential for assessing the possibility of surgery as a treatment. A specific software package was developed to locate the epileptogenic focus using Ictal and Inter-ictal SPECT images and MRI employing the SISCOM methodology. FocusDET was developed using GIMIAS facilities.

• QuantiDopa is a software that allows to perform a semiautomatic quantification of the striatal uptake in neurotransmission SPECT studies of the dopaminergic system.