[Nipy-devel] ITK question

[Fernando Perez]

Hi Karl,

On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Karl Young <Karl.Young@ucsf.edu> wrote:
>
> I've been casting about writing some scripts to automate some of the
> jobs that people do in our lab using ITK and it occurred to me to check
> in re. the latest thinking on the relationship between ITK and NiPy. I
> certainly understand the concerns about saddling potential users with
> such a monstrosity but on the other hand you get an awful lot (and maybe
> even a useful framework for "easily" adding new segmentation,
> registration,... tools). I was impressed with the Mayavi demos at SciPy
> 08 and recall that last year Prahbu and Gael were expressing similar
> concerns about VTK (i.e. saddling their users with the monstrosity of
> VTK) but seem pretty unconcerned about that now. So I was wondering if
> their experience had any effect on thinking about NiPy/ITK.

I just had a look, and as of the *next* Ubuntu (Intrepid, available
October 08), ITK with python bindings will become available for
Ubuntu:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+package/python-insighttoolkit3

In my perspective, this means that in a few months,  developers using
Ubuntu could start playing with the idea  of something like

from neuroimaging.itktools import foo

and building itk-dependent tools well isolated in a submodule of nipy
that does NOT create a dependency for anything else.  If ITK ends up
providing great functionality and ease of development, these optional
tools will become desirable to others and we can look further into the
cost/benefit analysis for nipy.  In the meantime, that namespace gives
us a clean way to separate the optional components from the core.

Just my take on it...

f