BTK: An open-source toolkit for fetal brain MR image processing

Studies about brain maturation aim at providing a better understanding of brain development and links between brain changes and cognitive development. Such studies are of great interest for diagnosis help and clinical course of development and treatment of illnesses. However, the processing of fetal brain MR images remains complicated which limits the translation from the research to the clinical domain. In this article, we describe an open-source image processing toolkit dedicated to these images. In this toolkit various tools are included such as: denoising, image reconstruction, super-resolution and tractography. The BTK resource program (distributed under CeCILL-B license) is developed in C++and relies on common medical imaging libraries such as Insight Toolkit (ITK), Visualization Toolkit (VTK) and Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP). (C) 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.