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\page Architecture The Architecture of MITK

MITK is an open source software toolkit for medical image processing, subsequent data analysis and integration of medical hardware.
It is designed with the aim of providing a modular and reusable code base to enable rapid development of new features. Following
this design philosophy, MITK includes many specialized modules.

This document is aimed at giving an overview of the general structure of MITK. It will give you an introduction to the coding
and design concepts behind the toolkit.

\section OverviewPage_DesignOverview Design Overview

MITK is designed to be used either as a <B>pure software library</B> or as a <B>complete application framework</B>. Thus, a user
of MITK can decide if he or she simply wants to add a new plug-in to the existing application framework or to implement an
own application by using MITK as a software library. Depending on the type of use MITK uses different software libraries, which is
shown in the next figure for overview.

\imageMacro{MitkOverview.png,"Overview of MITK",16}

As shown above, MITK uses the following libraries.
<ul>
 <li> The <a href="http://www.itk.org">Insight Toolkit (ITK)</a>, which provides registration and
segmentation algorithms, but is not designed for visualization or interaction.

 <li> The <a href="http://www.vtk.org">Visualization Toolkit (VTK)</a>, which provides powerful visualization capabilities
 and low-level support for interaction such as picking methods, rotation, movement and scaling of objects.

 <li> The <a href="http://www.commontk.org">Common Toolkit (CTK)</a>, which focuses on DICOM support and a plug-in framework.

 <li> The <a href="http://qt.nokia.com/">Qt Cross-platform application and UI framework (Qt)</a> as a framework for UI and application
 support.
</ul>

These are the main libraries MITK is based on. For more functionality you can optionally include other libraries as well. A list of used libraries can be found \ref thirdpartylibs "here" .

Based on these libraries, MITK includes the following features:
<ul>
 <li>High level interactions with data.
 <li>Specialized medical imaging algorithms (e.g. segmentation)
 <li>Support of 3D + t data.
 <li>Complete application framework, expandable by plug-ins
 <li>Standard tools for medical imaging as default plug-ins (e.g. measurement, segmentation)
 <li>Many specialized modules for different topics on medical imaging (e.g. diffusion imaging, image guided therapy, live image/ultrasound data processing)
</ul>

*/
