The MITK Image Guided Therapy Toolkit and Its Exemplary Application for Augmented Reality Guided Prostate Surgery

Image Guided Therapy (IGT) faces researchers with high demands and efforts in system design, prototype implementation, and evaluation. The lack of standardized software tools, like algorithm implementations, tracking device and tool setups, and data processing methods escalate the labor for system development and sustainable system evaluation. In this paper, a new toolkit component of the Medical Imaging and Interaction Toolkit (MITK), the MITK-IGT, and its exemplary application for computer-assisted prostate surgery are presented. MITK-IGT aims at integrating software tools, algorithms and tracking device interfaces into the MITK toolkit to provide a comprehensive software framework for computer aided diagnosis support, therapy planning, treatment support, and radiological follow-up. An exemplary application of the MITK-IGT framework is introduced with a surgical navigation system for laparoscopic prostate surgery. It illustrates the broad range of application possibilities provided by the framework, as well as its simple extensibility with custom algorithms and other software modules.