1. Surgical Planning Laboratory Brigham and Women’s Hospital Boston, Massachusetts USA a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School Why Open-Source Will Make Our Life Better Ron Kikinis, M.D. Professor of Radiology, Harvard Medical School Founding Director, Surgical Planning Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Principal Investigator, National Alliance for Medical Image Computing (a National Center for Biomedical Computing, part of the Roadmap Initiative), and Neuroimage Analysis Center (a NCRR National Resource Center) Research Director, Image Guided Therapy Program, Brigham and Women’s Hospital

2. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 2 Acknowledgments F. Jolesz, W. Lorensen, W. Schroeder, C. Tempany, P. Black, K. Hynynen, S. Wells, N. Hata, S. Warfield, CF. Westin, M. Halle, S. Pieper, and many more….

3. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 3 The Two Worlds of IGT Clinical devices –Government regulated (for protection) 1.“Freeze” the procedure and devices 2.Characterize behavior 3.Document Research devices –Regulated through research protocols 1.Frequent modifications 2.Characterization/testing is an afterthought 3.Documentation is always behind

4. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 4 Consequences Proprietary software and hardware –Locks researchers to a single vendor –Prevents leveraging of the work of other scientists Graduate students (the work force of science) eternally reinvent the wheel

5. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 5 A Public Highway … “NA-MIC kit” is like a Public Road System: Provides open source infrastructure –“Driveways” can Lead to Anything: a Private Facility (commercial product) a Public Park (FOSS) FOSS= Free Open Source Software Provided by Pieper, Kikinis

6. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 6 Hardware Standards USB keys are an excellent example for a successful hardware/software standard: –Devices available from different vendors –Same device works on different computers with a variety of operating systems Closer to IGT: Opentracker is an emerging BSD licensed package that provides an open interface to several proprietary tracking systems

7. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 7 My Recommendations Free Open Source Software –NA-MIC methodology allows multi-party development and quality assurance –Potential to bridge the gap between research and clinical devices Open Standards for Hardware interfaces –Computer industry offers good templates: Standardization through ACM and IEEE

8. ©2006 Surgical Planning Laboratory, ARR Slide 8 Commercial Efforts Commercialization is the proper channel for distributing clinical devices Value-added commercialization is the proper mechanism to take advantage of open research The proposed framework with BSD style license and infrastructure for automated testing lowers the threshold for translational work