Introducing RTKIT - The radiotherapy DICOM toolkit

[Christoffer Lervåg]

As some of you may have noticed from the ruby-dicom 0.9.3 announcement, I promised another project announcement to follow.

The project's name is RTKIT, and can be found at github here:

https://github.com/dicom/rtkit

This project builds on ruby-dicom, but it is much more specific than ruby-dicom, meaning that most of you will (probably) not have use for it. It is focused on my particular field of work, which is radiotherapy. In radiotherapy, we have a set of dedicated modalities (e.g. RTSTRUCT, RTPLAN and RTDOSE), which holds information which are (a) somewhat complex (big hierarchies with lots of data) and (b) hold a lot of references between myriads of files. This information is somewhat difficult to digest outside the scope of the available commercial systems, and although some free 'dicom viewers' exist, there's not much available in the form of scriptable, high level libraries that can be used by 'ordinary' people (i.e. non-programmers). Hence, my motivation for creating RTKIT, the radiotherapy DICOM toolkit.

It's been a couple of years since I got the idea for this project, and about a year since I started working on it. Therefore, it is a great relief to finally have pushed the code out in the open and be able to talk about it.

Tomorrow I am going to ESTRO31, a european oncology conference, where I will be presenting RTKIT with a poster. Should you by chance be going there, or know anyone who is, please stop by my poster and have a chat! This is actually my first ever poster presentation, and I'm somewhat excited about that. But first and foremost, it is a great pleasure to finally release this code, as Im convinced that it can be a very useful tool for those of you that are in the field of radiotherapy.

If you happen to find interest in this, please check it out, and don't hesitate to contact me to discuss how this can be of value to you.

Best regards,

Chris

[Steven Bedrick]

This is fabulous news! We've been using ruby-dicom for a couple of years now to handle RTSTRUCT files, and a dedicated toolkit will be most welcome. Congratulations, and good luck at ESTRO31!

-SB

[Justin Richter]

Congrats! Getting code out in the open can be a relief.  Good luck at the conference.

[Simon]

Congratulations! Will definitely check it out.

On Tuesday, May 8, 2012 5:06:14 PM UTC-5, Christoffer Lervåg wrote:

[Ron Sweeney]

+1 on congratulations, valuable stuff.

I am sure your presentation today will rock.

--
Ron Sweeney
Medical Imaging by Example
<http://www.ideafoundry.info/medical-imaging>
Health Neutral

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