The community of 3D Slicer developers is proud to announce that version 5.2 is now available for download. This version begins our new release cycle, where we will aim for 3-4 releases per year. This release includes support for using 3D Slicer via its web API and support for installing ITK python packages through pip. It also includes many improved core modules and more than 10 new-and-improved extensions.
3D Slicer 5.2 builds on the success of earlier versions that have had over 1.2 million downloads of the core program and 6.1 million downloads of extensions during the last decade.
The development of 3D Slicer—including its numerous modules, extensions, datasets, pull requests, patches, issues reports, suggestions—is made possible by users, developers, contributors and commercial partners around the world. 3D Slicer is based on a stack of open-source software and we are working constantly on updating the underlying packages. This development is funded by various grants and agencies. For more details, please see the 3D Slicer Acknowledgments page.
One of the main distinguishing features of 3D Slicer is its easy extensibility enabled by good quality documentation, a thriving community, cross-platform support & open source code. 3D Slicer supports a number of extension types which offer a different mix of simplicity and range of control of the software.
A rigorous quality assurance system leveraging automated testing and user feedback ensures the timely detection of issues caused by ongoing work in different components of the platform. See the contributing guidelines
slicer.org is the portal to the application, training materials, and the development community.
The Slicer Tutorials page provides a series of tutorials and data sets for training in the use of Slicer.
Please note that Slicer continues to be a research package and is not intended for clinical use (clinical users must obtain the necessary ethics or regulatory approvals).
Alignment of primate skulls with SlicerMorph through ITK and ITK remote module Python packages. Registration of the skulls facilicates shape-based quantification of the morphological characteristics of specimens and related species.
Slicer Web API
Slicer’s REST API is improved and extended, which web applications and other external software to use 3D Slicer features.
The new slicerio.server features of slicerio Python package allows using Slicer as a data viewer in any Python environment. All files are loaded into a single Slicer instance, which eliminates the wait time for application startup and also allows analyzing, comparing multiple data sets in one workspace.
Developers can choose log level (error, warning, info, debug) that is displayed in the Python interactor (or can completely disable log message display) in Application Settings: Python / Python interactor / Log level.
Changed the window/level reset operation to be control-left-doubleclick to avoid interfering with the default view operation of maximizing/restoring view size using left-double-click. (PR-6597)
When setting window/level mode also activate it (PR-6572)
Support setting slice view font file programmatically (PR-6642)
Regularize acquisition geometry by default for DICOM image loading. Since it has proven to work well over the past several years (it allows loading unusual image geometries correctly and does not seem to result in extra complications), it is now enabled by default.
Make it easier to export multiple series under the same DICOM study by ensuring automatically created patient and study items have valid IDs. (899e36a25)
Fixed DICOM tags saving in subject hierarchy: When no series-level tags were required for any of the exportables then modifications to patient and study level tags were not saved. (4df0251fb)
Markups
Fixed control point state not updated with hidden coordinates (PR-6657)
Updated scissors “Apply to visible segments” label: The label was misleading, since enabling it caused the scissors effect to only apply on all visible segments. Changed label from “Apply to all segments” to “Apply to visible segments”.
Fixed crash when exporting segment model node (PR-6614)
SubjectHierarchy
Fixed warning GetChildByPositionUnderParent: Failed to find subject hierarchy item under parent... when setting item parent or moving an item to be the last item in a subject hierarchy folder (a9cb8f63ff)
Fixed warning message when entering Volumes module: ctkDoubleRangeSlider::setSingleStep( 0.0001 ) is outside of valid bounds. warning was logged once during initialization of the widget. (37711246e)
Sequence
Updated MultiVolumeImporter to add acquisition attributes to volume sequences node. (5c6a247ba)
Infrastructure
Continuous integration (CI)
Added “Check Commit Message” and “Check Line Length” GitHub actions workflows.
Fixed use of run_ctest_ variables in dashboard driver script (PR-6585)
HDBrainExtraction: AI-based skull stripping (blanking out regions outside the brain in MRI images). The model is trained on a large set of images and proven to be more robust than many other similar tools.
