MicroView 2.2 Release Notes¶
Supported Platforms¶
MicroView is supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows (XP/Vista/Win7), Linux (both 32-bit and 64-bit PC architectures), and Mac OS X 10.3 for the older PPC platforms. MicroView does not work on recent releases of OS X such as Lion. See the section on platform-specific release notes for more details.
General Improvements¶
This release offers a number of general improvements to MicroView, including:
- MovieMaker - the original release of the MovieMaker for all platforms was somewhat unreliable. A new movie making tool has been integrated that makes the system more stable. However, to use the new tool, a number of movie output options has been reduced, and it is no longer possible to change the frame rate of the movie.
- File associations - file association support has been partially integrated into the Mac OS X version. If a file is double clicked, it will open a new instance of MicroView. However, it is not possible to open a file into a running copy of MicroView by double clicking on it, nor is it possible to drag an image file over the MicroView icon to open it.
New Features and Changes¶
New Features¶
- ROI Manager - the ROI manager feature enables MicroView to store more than one ROI in memory at a time. This functionality was not previously supported. Further, it is possible to visualize or show multiple ROIs simultaneously, enabling more complex visualizations. The tool supports loading and saving these ROIs. It is also possible to combine two ROIs to create a third, composite ROI, and perform all of these functions on the result.
- Shape constrained region growing - the current region growing tool uses a simple threshold operation to determine if the voxels are in the region or not. This new region growing tool also requires that the total feature found meet particular shape parameters. This can be useful when trying to segment a compartment of an organ, such as a ventricle of the heart, when contrast agent is used. The original region growing tool would grow the region into the aorta. Using the shape constrained tool, it is possible to constrain the feature so that the segmentation result does not include the aorta.
Advanced ROI Tool¶
The advanced ROI tool has two major enhancements.
- Shrink wrapping - the shrink wrap feature allows the user to draw an approximate outline of a shape using the polygon tool, and then attempts to automatically find the true outline. Once this outline has been found, the extrude function can be used to perform the shrink wrapping operation and outline an entire organ or other feature of interest. The shrink wrap feature can either shrink to fit the feature of interest, or grow, depending on where the initial contour is drawn relative to the feature of interest.
- Contract - the contract feature can be used in a similar fashion to the shrink wrap feature. The outline must be drawn outside of the feature of interest, and will always shrink to the shape. The contract feature shrinks the shape until a preset gray level threshold is reached or crossed.
Obsolete and Deprecated Functions¶
- The Overlay Geometry plugin was deprecated in MicroView 2.2 and has been removed.
Known Bugs¶
- #19531 - On some Windows platforms with ATI graphic card adapters, MicroView will fail to load, randomly, if hardware acceleration is enabled. While there is no known solution for this problem, disabling hardware acceleration will typically circumvent the problem.
- #24464 - On some Windows platforms, it is not possible to overlap the MicroView window with another while making a movie. The resulting movie will have missing frames or parts of the MicroView volume that are not visible. To generate a good movie, run the movie making process with MicroView in the foreground and do not perform any other actions on the system.
