Fwd: Call for contributors

[NA]

There is a new, award winning, open source, volume visualization  
project which is currently in version 1.5 on PowerPC.
http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/Index2.html
This is currently a Macintosh only application.

OsiriX is gaining enormous support in the radiology and volume  
visualization communities throughout the globe.
The initial development funding was via grant from the Swiss  
Government, to Dr. Antione Rossette. The development has been done  
primarily at UCLA, to date.

There is extreme interest in porting this application to Linux. There  
is no open source Windows or Linux application of any caliber, anywhere  
near OsiriX. The speed and excellence of the development owes to using  
the rapid application development tools that are at the core of both  
Mac OS X and GnuStep. We believe that the GnuStep community is well  
aware of this. We would like the rest of the world to know. Interested  
developers are presenting with notable credentials from institutions  
across the globe.

It quickly became apparent that GnuStep should allow a far simpler  
Mac2Linux port, than any other environment. Does that seem to be the  
concensus? We are interested in discovering any interest on the part of  
GnuStep users and developers in participating in this project.

In addition to contributors, we are seeking help with further refining  
the development path. Knowledgeable individuals with experience porting  
Mac applications to Linux are encouraged to participate.

It is currently anticipated that a Power5/PowerPC initial version will  
be the simplest to port, as most of the system calls to Altivec, of  
which there are many, should work transparently. Any insight here would  
be helpful.

Any information and assistance on any of these matters would be greatly  
appreciated. Suggestions to ease the porting, such as the applicability  
of Renaissance in this situation, would be of help. Any source of  
information that anyone can suggest that would serve as a road map in  
the process would be invaluable.

Any participation and assistance by non-PPC developers would be  
desirable, particularly in finding the appropriate non-Power based  
Linux corollaries to proprietary Aqua, Altivec, QuickTime and Quartz  
system calls.  Additionally, as we progress to an x86 based version as  
opposed to a PPC version, information on differences in code  
requirements will be critical.

Having developers with access to non-Apple, non-PPC hardware to port  
this to, would also be of enormous benefit to our efforts; as the  
purpose is to make the application universally available.

The source code is available at the website as a .dmg, but can be  
provided in other versions. Please contact us if you are interested
http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/Index2.html
Select downloads from the left hand menu and scroll to "Download the  
complete source code of OsiriX : Source Code Page"

OsiriX Architecture:
http://homepage.mac.com/rossetantoine/osirix/PICTS/ 
OsiriXArchitecture.gif
I also have a list of the links for all of the open source components  
below, for those interested:
# VTK (Visualization Toolkit)
# ITK (Insight Toolkit)
# PixelMed (David Clunie)
# Papyrus 3.0 (Digital Imaging Unit)
# DICOM Offis
# OpenGL
# XML-Expat
# LibTIFF
# Jasper
# LibJPEG

This project is also listed on SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/osirix/

The Wiki can be found at  
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Online_Osirix_Documentation
This is only a couple of weeks old, so please bear with us.

I have several questions to pose to this list, but I would like to be  
sure that this is the best forum to do so.
Are there other message boards; which anyone feels are as, or more,  
appropriate?

Thank You for your time.

Bryan L. Kaufman MD, MS
bryan_at_apexrad_dot_com