About InVesalius
InVesalius is a medical public software which aims to assist diagnosis and surgical planning. Based on a sequence of two dimensional (2D) images, acquired through computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MRI) equipments, InVesalius allows the reconstruction of virtual three dimensional (3D) models, correspondent to the anatomical region of interest. The software has shown to be versatile, contributing with various fields, among which medicine, odontology, veterinary, archeology and engineering.
Regarding input, InVesalius imports 2D DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) files and exports 3D STL (stereolithography) files (among others filetypes), allowing these models' physical print through Rapid Prototyping.
Sponsoring
InVesalius?' core team is sponsored by Renato Archer Information of Technology Center, a research institute of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology.
History
Initially available as freeware (and not as open software), the first version of InVesalius was developed from 2001 to 2004, and it was available only for Windows in Portuguese. Its first release occurred during April 2003. Although freeware, until February 2007 its access was very restrict: in order to use it, it was necessary to generate a series number for each machine and to request for a individual license key.
InVesalius was completely rewritten from 2004 until 2009. InVesalius 2 provided user interface improvements.
Major changes were applied to InVesalius 2, so it could be released on November 2007. It was internationalized and became available in Portuguese, English and Spanish, initially only for Windows.
During November 2007 InVesalius was open-sourced (GNU GPL 2), due to a partership with Brazilian Ministry of Planning, through the Public Software Portal.
Soon InVesalius 2 was ported to GNU Linux by community, but this package presented several problems.
Very unstable, the two first versions of InVesalius presented critical bugs. Due to the lack of planning and project (source-code) structure, both versions presented memory leaks and crashing issues. Also, as an open source project, it was very immature -- there was very little community feedback and absolutedly no patches.
From December 2008 on, the development team decided it was time to plan and write InVesalius form scatch again. The idea was to make small releases providing each time more features, but stimulating community to feedback and help.
During January 2010 InVesalius 3.0.0 Beta 1 was released, having excellent feedback from community from them on.
Also, in order to stimulate community development, a public Trac tool was configured and started to be used on January 2010.
Keep Trac of InVesalius, through this website!
