2025.06.17 Weekly Meeting

Community Weekly meetings
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Today, we will be having our next weekly hangout at 11:00 AM ET until 12:00 PM ET, after the project week meeting. We will be reusing the Project Week Zoom link.

Anyone is welcome to join at this link: Launch Meeting - Zoom

Agenda:

Please post to this thread to put a topic on the agenda! We will try to prioritize agenda items during the meeting.

Thanks
Sam and J-Christophe

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I’d like to discuss some work I’ve been doing on integrating SimNIBS in SlicerTMS using rpyc and some of the performance issues I’ve discovered in updating the scalar array.

1 Like
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As a followup, here’s info on the rendering performance issue I mentioned during the meeting. Looks like it will be easy to resolve with a patch to VTK. I’ll test it out and make a an MR to upstream VTK that we may want to merge into Slicer/VTK sooner.

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Meeting Notes

Experiment with RPyC for Streaming Scalar Fields

  • @pieper explored the use of RPyC (Remote Python Call) to stream scalar fields associated with unstructured grids.

  • What is RPyC?
    A Python library for symmetrical remote procedure calls, clustering, and distributed computing. It can use shared memory for efficient local communication of large arrays between processes.

  • Current Bottleneck:

    • When updating the scalar field, the surface mesh is re-extracted during each render, even though the underlying unstructured grid remains unchanged.
    • This causes performance issues for large meshes.

  • Next Steps:

    • Investigate possible rendering optimizations, likely at the vtkMRMLModelDisplayNode level, to avoid redundant surface extraction.

SlicerTelemetry

  • Test Server Deployment:

    • A test server has been deployed using domcloud.co under a free-tier plan.
    • It allows trying out the SlicerTelemetry extension and viewing collected data via a web interface.
    • :warning: Note: Free-tier hosting may trigger browser phishing warnings—this will not be an issue for the production deployment.

  • Hosting Plans:

    • To avoid giving a poor first impression, discussed alternative testing hosts that do not trigger phishing warnings.
    • In production, the service will be hosted under a proper domain, such as stats.slicer.org.

  • Repository Renaming:

    • The server repository was renamed from
      BerDom-Ing/Slicer-Telemetry → BerDom-Ing/slicer-usage-stats-backend.

  • Related Pull Requests: