AMC Postprocessing Package (APP for short) is a project of the Academical Medical Center in Amsterdam in association with the University for professional education of Amsterdam. It is designed to analyse data sets that are made by an MRI scanner. It can display the result on top of an anatomical data set. The data set can be resliced to match the parameters of the scan if necessary.

Features

  • Easy to use, intuitive user interface
  • Opens Dicom and Analyze data sets
  • Transparent reslicing of multiple scans
  • Open multiple data sets underneath each other
  • Use multiple viewports, dynamically assigned
  • Plugin infrastructure, deploy your own plugins
  • Multithreading core, continue working while analysing
  • Takes full advantage of multi processor systems
  • Platform independent: Solaris, Unix, Win32, etc.
AMC Postprocessing Package screenshot

Analysis

Currently APP has two plugins capable of analysing Perfusion and fMRI data sets. The Perfusion plugin uses it's own fully optimised core and the fMRI plugin uses the FEAT engine. Analysis is done in separate threads keeping the front-end fully responsive while analysing.

Reslicing

Reslicing is done completely transparent to the user and underlying plugins. When the user opens an overlay or anatomical underlay, they are resliced to the research data set. Also the research dataset can be resliced to the anatomical underlay. This makes it possible to immediately reslice the results of the analysis to a higher resolution scan, for example an mprage sagital scan.

Reslice

Annotating

Data sets can be annotated upon each other, for example multiple fMRI results can be annotated into one greyscale dataset. This makes it possible to display the fMRI results of multiple fMRI scans in one data set.

Annotate

File I/O

APP has import/export plugins for Dicom and Analyze file formats, The Dicom plugin also supports exporting to Dicom servers in a network (similar to the CTN tool send_image). All Dicom tags that could not be exported to Analyze are stored in an XML file, so the original Dicom files can be restored from such a file.

File I/O

Scripting

Most of APP's functionality can be scripted using the supplied command-line tools. There are tools for: analysing, annotating, converting and relicing, also some support tools: dcm2xml (for generating generic XML files from Dicom files) and dcmsplit (to organise a group of Dicom files into subdirectories). Many of APP's functionality is available through these tools, including sending the result directly to a Dicom server.

Multi-platform

One of the major design features in APP is the multi-platform aspect, this makes it easier to implement in existing infrastructures without major changes to the current system. We realised this with the multi-platform toolkits: Qt and VTK.

Multi-platform