A modular software system for computer-aided surgery and its first application in oral implantology

Development of complex software applications in image guided therapy (IGT) is often complicated by the fact that providing basic functionality for ima ge processing and user interaction from a graphical user interfaces (GUI) r equires considerable manpower for software development. We present a progra mming environment that combines the high-level image processing library AVW , in-house developed patient-to-image registration procedures, and an inter face to position measurement hardware. A specific application can be develo ped by using Tcl/Tk, a simple platform-independent scripting language, for SUI development, This environment was applied to developing VISIT, a naviga tion sg stem for computer-aided implant dentistry. VISIT is presented as a result of this paper. Parts of the development environment were made access ible to the public, Future work includes the implementation of video input for connecting ultrasound or fluoroscopy units. We conclude that our approa ch is well suited to accelerate the development of exploratory new applicat ions of IGT.