Integration of the OpenIGTLink Network Protocol for Image-Guided Therapy with the Medical Platform MeVisLab
This work provides a practical tool for researchers in medical imaging and image-guided therapy to standardize communication between software and hardware, though it is incremental as it implements an existing protocol in a new platform.
The authors integrated the OpenIGTLink network protocol into the MeVisLab medical prototyping platform, enabling researchers to connect MeVisLab software with hardware devices like the NDI Aurora magnetic tracking system and communicate with Slicer for image-guided therapy applications.
We present the integration of the OpenIGTLink network protocol for image-guided therapy (IGT) with the medical prototyping platform MeVisLab. OpenIGTLink is a new, open, simple and extensible network communication protocol for IGT. The protocol provides a standardized mechanism to connect hardware and software by the transfer of coordinate transforms, images, and status messages. MeVisLab is a framework for the development of image processing algorithms and visualization and interaction methods, with a focus on medical imaging. The integration of OpenIGTLink into MeVisLab has been realized by developing a software module using the C++ programming language. As a result, researchers using MeVisLab can interface their software to hardware devices that already support the OpenIGTLink protocol, such as the NDI Aurora magnetic tracking system. In addition, the OpenIGTLink module can also be used to communicate directly with Slicer, a free, open source software package for visualization and image analysis. The integration has been tested with tracker clients available online and a real tracking system.