The IGSIO was founded after lengthy discussions regarding the standardization of tracked ultrasound communication to work towards improving the interoperability between industrial products and research software platforms [1]. Prior to these discussions, the commonly accepted solution was to pass specially constructed messages over the OpenIGTLink protocol. This workaround solution indicated that a more formal definition was needed to enable the research community to move towards a vision held by the founding members.
The mission of the IGSIO is to develop a written standard defining the communication of tracked ultrasound systems between software platforms and to produce an open-source reference implementation of an OpenIGTLink client and server for use by any adhering software platform.
We seek to achieve the following goals:
- To advance the image-guided systems community through co-operation and collaboration
- To define a written standard for tracked ultrasound communication
- To provide a reference standard implementation of a tracked ultrasound client/server
The standard is presented here as a draft. Extensions to the OpenIGTLink protocol have been proposed [2] and implementation of these extensions is underway [3].