I am a dentist and software engineer and have been successfully using Slicer over the past few years to plan simple dental implant surgeries and, in combination with 3D modelling packages, design surgical guides. And for that, I would like to thank the Slicer community for all their hard work. However, this workflow is pretty complex and time consuming at the moment.
I believe that by extending Slicer and Blender, this workflow could become usable by clinicians and researchers alike. To see whether there is any interest from the community, I am launching a crowdfunding campaign for the development of the required extensions. If successful, it would allow us (I am the co-founder of a startup company doing dental software development) to allocate a developer full-time to this project. All the details are available at:
As mentioned there, only if the minimum goal is reached will we accept funds. We have not set a minimum contribution amount, as we know research groups each have their own budget limits.
If you know someone else who might be interested in this project, please help spread the word.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to either contact me directly or write to kruvi@bthbdental.com.
Nice initiative. Crowdfunding projects that I’ve seen so far have been mainly about collecting small sums from thousands of people, so it’ll be interesting to see if it can be successful in a different scheme (having a few groups contributing $10k or so each). Have you considered applying for government grants for small business development and/or getting funding from private investors?
Note that since Segment Editor module is introduced, a completely Slicer-based workflow is available for mold creation from anatomical images. There is no more need for Blender, MeshMixer, Mimics, or other software anymore. See tutorials here. If you miss some processing tools in Slicer that you would need for your workflow then let us know.
Of course, having all the tools in Slicer is not enough, for routine clinical use we always need to develop customized user interfaces and automate time-consuming steps that makes a particular workflow easy to perform. Therefore your project goals make sense and the budget seems to be realistic as well.
@jcfr: Thank you for your comment. I’ve had a look at SlicerCMF in the past, and look forward to see what possibilities for collaboration might come from that.
@lassoan: We started by thinking about who the target user could be, but seeing how Slicer (understandably) starts with a big disclaimer about how it is not for meant for clinical use, we decided to target research groups with our campaign, and focus more on, as you said, a few groups contributing more.
I think this campaign will give us a better feel of the interest/resources available in the community, and also who exactly the members of this community are. We could be wrong, of course, and if we see more interest coming from clinicians, we are open to change. Grants are also something we are looking into, but like I said, I think this campaign will let us evaluate if there is actual interest from the community in this specific field.
The Segment Editor module is great, and I am also about to publish a video describing a workflow for the maxillo-facial region. I hadn’t seen the latest videos yet, thank you for the link and for your offer to help – I will definitely let you know what obstacles we hit once we start planning/development.
I fully agree on the last point, once you get used to Slicer I find the interface quite usable, but specialized applications need specialized user interfaces. Speaking of which, I really liked the Slicelets concept so I am looking forward to looking into whether that could provide a starting point for our needs.
