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MicroView 2.5.0 Release Notes

General Notes

MicroView 2.5.0 represents a major release unlike any in the history of the software: the underlying platform has been modernized and all software dependencies have been ported to recent releases. MicroView has been ported from VTK 4.4 to 5.10, which provides it with a more stable and capable visualization framework. A completely new user interface, based on wxWidgets, has been written which permits the software to be ported to a wide variety of platforms and uses native widgets in place of the custom Motif-style Tkinter widgets used in previous releases. Under the hood, all images are treated as DICOM objects, which facilitates maintaining image meta data between different image formats in a much better fashion. With compatible hardware, MicroView will begin to leverage GPU-acceleration in a variety of places, most visibly with volume rendering.

New Features

  • Multi-image support: Multiple images can be loaded into separate viewer tabs in MicroView, simultaneously. Tabs can be arranged on the screen side-by-side to facilitate image comparison and image registration. Tabs can be cloned, to permit side-by-side comparison and analysis of the same image without incurring additional memory overhead.
  • New image formats: MicroView 2.5.0 adds support for Jpeg2000, FITS, Nifti, ISQ, VTK Metafile, BioRad, Drishti, VG Studio Max export format, VOX, WEBP and more. It also radically improves support for DICOM (including DICOMDIR), as well as Analyze, and MINC. A full list of supported file formats can be found in File formats.
  • New filters: MicroView 2.5.0 supports a wider collection of common filters, including: minium, maximum, and median filters. It also includes a variety of static and adaptive thresholding and morphological operators.
  • A simplified scripting interface: Third-party scripts can be writte in python to perform simple tasks. Each script is passed a numpy array linking to the currently selected image and some simple meta data - scripts simply make changes to the image array and return results.

  • New plugins:

    MicroView 2.5.0 adds a variety of new plugins including:

    • image CT Toolbox: A replacement plugin for the original GE CT Calibration tool. This plugin contains a variety of useful tools for CT image analysis.
    • image Reconstruct: A basic front-end to the Parallax Innovations GPU reconstruction tools. This plugin allows you to monitor reconstruction progress on reconstruction compute engines.
    • image Point-picker: A new plugin that mimics a similar tool in GE's Analysis+ version of MicroView. Useful for recording, measuring and manipulating fiducial markers on an image.
    • image Advanced ROI: A replacement plugin for the original GE 'Advanced ROI' tool. This plugin closely mimics the look-and-feel of it's predecessor but lacks some of the more advanced features of the original plugin.
    • image Flood-fill Region Grow: A new plugin that mimics GE's original region growing plugin, but with a number of additional features.
    • image Camera Info: Shows camera transform info as well as cut plane information. Can load and save both camera and image slice orientation information.
    • image Interactive Shell: Perhaps the most powerful tool in MicroView: MicroView 2.5.0 now has an interactive shell, which allows access to loaded images as 3D image arrays. A variety of open-source packages can be directly used on images including Numpy and Scipy.
    • image Rescale Image: Use this plugin to apply linear transformations to voxel values in an image.
    • image Image Math: Perform simple mathematical operations (e.g. addition, subtraction, multiply, divide) on an image using either scalar constants or pixel-by-pixel operations when provided with a second image.
    • image Data Conduit: Import data from IDL™ and Matlab™ datasets.

  • Plugin Improvements:

    • image The Standard ROI plugin gains spherical ROI support as well as the ability to rotate ROI primitives.
    • image The image information plugin now displays DICOM tags for all image types.
    • image The Image transfer plugin has been rewritten to natively support DICOM network transfers, rather than relying on 3rd party tools. It will automatically detect Osirix workstations as well as the Parallax Image Bank. The plugin also understands a number of other transfer mechanisms, such as a faster web-based transfer mechanism for Orthanc.
    • image The Render volume plugin has been rewritten from the ground up, and now supports GPU-accelerated rendering.
    • image The Geometry manager has been rewritten to support a larger variety of datatypes. Unstructured grids, vector fields and surfaces can now be viewed, with a wider range of viewing options.
    • image The Movie Maker plugin has been rewritten to use the OpenCV library on all platforms. It has been extended to support combining multiple basic sequences together, thus enabling more complicated movie generation.

Supported Platforms

Windows

MicroView is now supported on 32-bit and 64-bit Windows (XP/Vista/Win7/Win8/Win10) platforms. Versions of Windows prior to Windows XP are no longer supported.

Linux

MicroView is now supported on Centos, Fedora and Ubuntu platforms. Binary installers are available that target each platform's long-term support releases for a minimum of one support cycle. For example, MicroView Ubuntu binaries are currently available for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

macOS

MicroView is now supported on 64-bit Intel Mac platforms, starting with macOS 10.8. PPC platforms will no longer be supported.

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