Related Libraries

In this section we will explain various libraries that are related to Cornerstone3D.

History

Before explaining the libraries, we will first discuss the history of Cornerstone3D. Prior to Cornerstone3D we developed and maintained cornerstone-core and cornerstone-tools since 2014. Since the significance of improvements in Cornerstone3D over cornerstone-core and Cornerstone3DTools over cornerstone-tools is much greater, in long term we will switch our focus to Cornerstone3D and provide adequate documentation for how to upgrade from legacy cornerstone to the new Cornerstone3D. In the meantime, we will continue to maintain the legacy cornerstone packages and take care of potential critical bugs.

In addition to the cornerstone-core and cornerstone-tools packages, we have also maintained react-vtkjs-viewport our first iteration to enable 3D rendering using vtk-js in React. react-vtkjs-viewport is currently being used in the current main OHIF Viewer for the MPR views. One of the main motivations that prompted the development of the Cornerstone3D was the desire to be able to decouple the rendering from the UI by React similar to cornerstone-core. In addition, react-vtkjs-viewport's memory management was a major challenge for more complex scenarios such as a PET/CT fusion with 10 viewports. Similar to legacy cornerstone, we will shift our efforts from react-vtkjs-viewport to use the new Cornerstone3D and Cornerstone3DTools packages.

Libraries

vtk.js

vtk-js is an open-source javascript library for 3D computer graphics, image processing and visualization. In the past, we have used vtk-js for rendering and interacting with 3D data in react-vtkjs-viewport library. Cornerstone3D's Rendering Engine has been designed to use vtk-js for 3D rendering. vtk-js has annotation support using tools, but we have decided to use Cornerstone3DTools for this purpose, and only rely on vtk-js for the actual rendering. Our roadmap (not funded yet) includes enabling usage of vtk-js 3D annotation tools in Cornerstone3D.

OHIF Viewer

Open Health Imaging Foundation (OHIF) image viewer is an open source image viewer that is being used in academic and commercial projects such as The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA) and NCI Imaging Data Commons. It is an extensible web imaging platform with zero footprint and installation required. Currently, OHIF relies on the cornerstone-core and cornerstone-tools libraries for its image rendering and annotation features and OHIF team has been actively maintaining these libraries for the past several years.

As Cornerstone3D and Cornerstone3DTools will replace cornerstone-core and cornerstone-tools in the future, OHIF in its next stable release (v3) will move towards using Cornerstone3D and Cornerstone3DTools instead of cornerstone-core and cornerstone-tools. You can see OHIF's roadmap for the next stable release here.