MIWS Hackfest at BWH

For quite a while now we have been finding that meeting face to face and working on projects together is a great way to build communities and learn from each other. In NA-MIC we have held over 20 Project Weeks about 3D Slicer, ITK, VTK, and related topics (our 23rd is coming up mid-June in Heidelberg) and in CTK we held 10+ similar events working on C++ and Qt code sharable across a variety of application platforms.

As we blogged about earlier a group of us had decided it was time to apply the same methods to JavaScript and related web application topics for medical image. I was pleased to be able to host this group at the Surgical Planning Laboratory.

The working document for the event really tells the whole story so no need to repeat it here. The document has three basic sections:

• first, there are planning notes from before the event;
• second, there are discussion notes and links created during the event;
• and finally there are screenshots and descriptions of some of the results achieved during the week.

I was really amazed at how much was accomplished. We have some fundamental building blocks that will benefit many projects and we got to know each other. The results ranged from DICOM Segmentation Object interoperability, interactive annotation and painting tools, pure JavaScript DICOM reading/writing tools, and WebGL GPU accelerated rendering.

Above all it was remarkable that everyone was 100% agreed on fully open licenses (MIT, BSD, Apache, 3D Slicer, etc. No GPL and no “academic only” restrictions) so we can all work together without wondering what bits and pieces others are going to be willing to share.

At the same time it was valuable to exchange experience and opinions on the state of web development tools and technologies. From polymer to react and from gulp to webpack there is a constantly changing stream of implementation options and ideas. It takes a community of sharp developers to sort out development paths that result usable and sustainable results for our projects.