TECHNICAL PROGRESS - AN IST TOOL

An Image Segmentation Tool (IST) application has been designed as a MR image manipulation and analysis software. This tool is in the first place meant as a helping tool for manual segmentation/annotation of the MR images (not necessarily knee images). It enables that clinicians manually annotate (segment) every 2D slice of the MR sequence. Marked interesting regions for each 2D slice are afterwards stored as a XML document (output).

All features that are supported by the IST application are as follows:
- easy reading and writing of MR documents,
- simple navigation through the MR images,
- tool for segmentation/annotation of the MR images,
- a conversion tool from internal Toshiba MR image format into DICOM image format,
- an advanced help.

A segmentation tool, a core of IST application, has been added as utility for a verification phase inside the SimBio project, but it can be used also for other intentions. It enables to create, manipulate, delete and save contours or regions. It has advanced GUI (e.g. popup menus). Each annotation (e.g. meniscus) is represented with own colour, some descriptive text etc. There are integrated some user friendly routines like copying annotations from previous slices, importing annotations, zoom, etc.