Kitware Blog

Or possibly OP has access via his employer Kitware?

Kitware could be doing software consultancy for Formlabs. They already have expertise in 3D slicing [1][2][3], which is just what you need for 3D printing.

This is pure uninformed speculation:

Formlabs look like they have great hardware.

On the other hand they could be under competitive pressure on the software front.

Firstly there's Autodesk who launched Ember as an "Open" design [4] in roughly the same market as Formlabs Form 1/2.

This is straight out of the Joel Spolysky playbook [5] "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements." Autodesk's (MCAD) product is Inventor now transitioning to Fusion 360. 3D printing is the complement. That's why Ember's "electronics are shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, the same license under which we've shared Ember's resin and mechanical designs; the firmware is licensed under GNU GPL (see the source code itself for the full details)." [4]. You can bet that it will be a cold day in hell before Autodesk releases Inventor and/or Fusion 360's source code under any sort of FOSS license.

Secondly, there's Stratasys that bought GrabCAD mainly to acquire there MCAD software team, several of whom are ex Solidworks / Siemens PLM (Unigraphics/Parasolid/D-Cubed). Expect in the next few years for slicing of STL to be replaced by slicing of native MCAD file formats. That's a step up in development effort and probably needs Modeling kernel…

> To follow up with some research I did on this:
>
> No free DICOM viewer on the market carries FDA clearance or CE marking. Not 3D Slicer [1], not Horos [2], not OHIF. Even RadiAnt — which is paid and arguably the most popular Windows viewer — explicitly states "our viewer is not a medical product" and has no FDA/CE certification or timeline for one [3]. Interestingly, RadiAnt is also a solo-developer operation (Medixant, Poznań) — so the indie medical imaging developer is not a new phenomenon.
>
> The only DICOM viewer with both FDA 510(k) and CE Class IIa is OsiriX MD — paid (~$69/mo), Mac-only.
>
> What's interesting is how the open-source ecosystem handles this. As @shoo noted, license disclaimers provide baseline liability protection. But beyond that, both 3D Slicer and OHIF have served as the foundation for FDA-cleared commercial products — Kitware built an FDA-cleared lung imaging tool on top of Slicer [4], and OHIF's GitHub explicitly notes it has "served as the basis for many FDA Cleared medical imaging viewers" [5].
>
> So the pattern seems to be: the platform stays uncertified, companies build certified products on top of it. The certification barrier appears to be fundamentally an enterprise-level compliance investment (ISO 13485 QMS, 510(k) submission, post-market surveillance) — not a reflection of software quality.
>
> OrthoRay sits in the same regulatory space as every other free viewer. The difference is the intended audience — orthopedic surgeons doing…

>>The VA is a prime example of antiquated government computing; its main systems run on a 1960s vintage system called MUMPS, a dead digital language that few people under retirement age know how to use.

This is simply untrue. This language is now called 'M', and has been standardized as recently as 2005. All of TD Ameritrade's trades are processed on an M database.

M was doing NoSQL, web-scale computing on commodity hardware before many of us were even born. It can integrate with NodeJS (http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/465).

Look into Rob Tweed's ongoing work with M (http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/download/mumps-acceptable.pdf)
http://www.mgateway.com/docs/universalNoSQL.pdf
http://robtweed.wordpress.com/

CMake already has decent support for dependency building through External Projects:

http://www.kitware.com/media/html/BuildingExternalProjectsWithCMake2.8.html

There are a number of issues/annoyances with the mechanism, especially when working with local modifications, but nothing to make me eager to add the anguish of bash+CMake onto the existing toil of CMake.

(Arguably this also bootstraps a build environment, whereas CMake requires itself and an SDK in order to bootstrap, but at the point where a build environment needs to be scripted/reproducible containerization seems preferable)

C++ modules need a lot of communication between build systems, compilers, packaging environments, and other dev tools like clangd. Given some of that interop isn't available anywhere due to missing or at least unimplemented protocols, I expect XMake is overpromising here. The CMake blogs are more qualified:

1. General named module use: https://www.kitware.com/import-cmake-c20-modules/

2. Importing the std module: https://www.kitware.com/import-std-in-cmake-3-30/

Two female image processing researchers recently used a picture of Fabio as a test image in a paper of theirs:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.6429

(Additional discussion at http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/246)

Personally, I'm all for the use of amusing (arousing?) test images, as long as they exhibit features that actually make for a good test image (a mix of flat and textured regions, sharp boundaries, etc.).