title: IGSTK
text: # IGSTK
  
  The Image-Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK: pronounced IGStick) is a software package oriented to facilitate the development of image-guided surgery applications.
  
  IGSTK is an open-source software toolkit designed to enable biomedical researchers to rapidly prototype and create new applications for image-guided surgery. This toolkit provides functionalities that are commonly needed when implementing image-guided surgery applications, such as integration with optical and electromagnetic trackers, manipulation and visualization of DICOM datasets.
  
  ## History
  
  The development of IGSTK was funded by the US National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, one of the US National Institutes of Health NIH. Development started in 2003 as a collaboration between the ISIS Center at Georgetown University and Kitware. In 2004 a team from the CADDLab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill joined the project. Atamai a firm dedicated to development of image-guided surgery toolkits, joined in 2005.
  
  The project has been supported by several vendors of trackers.
  
  ## License
  
  * IGSTK is distributed as open-source software, under a BSD license.
  * It allows unrestricted use, including use in commercial products IGSTK License.
  * The copyright of IGSTK is held by the Insight Software Consortium.
  