Julius--a software framework for computer-aided-surgery.

In the paper we introduce Julius--an extendable cross-platform software framework for medical visualization and surgical planning. Julius features a modular, cross-platform design using Qt and Vtk libraries and comes with a set of image analysis components, like semi-automatic segmentation, registration, visualization and navigation. We also present a 3D surface generation pipeline used in Julius for generating surfaces from volume data. The pipeline consists of image based filtering, marching cubes surface extraction algorithm, surface decimation and surface smoothing steps. We use this approach within different medical applications like craniofacial surgical planning and will also show the overall software framework within the paper.