ITK-SNAP Distributed Segmentation Service (DSS) Middleware Layer

This is the source code of the middleware layer for the ITK-SNAP distributed segmentation service (DSS). ITK-SNAP is an interactive tool for segmentation of volumetric medical imaging datasets, like CT and MRI. DSS is a web-based application that allows scientists to make their advanced image processing algorithms available as services to ITK-SNAP users. The main "production" DSS service is running at https://dss.itksnap.org.

Full documentation, including quick-start guides for users and for service developers, is at https://alfabis-server.readthedocs.io.

What's in this repository

The middleware is a Python 3 web application (installable as the package itksnap-dss-server), using web.py and a local SQLite database — no separate database server needs to be installed or run.

A separate, standalone Python package, itksnap-dss, provides a client library for service-provider scripts that interact with a running DSS server (DSSClient) and a helper for editing ITK-SNAP workspace files (WorkspaceWrapper). See that repository if you're writing a service provider in Python rather than Bash/itksnap-wt.

Running your own instance

With pip, from a checkout of this repo (not yet published to PyPI):

pip install .

then:

itksnap-dss-server --server

By default this creates and initializes a SQLite database under ./datastore/ on first run. See itksnap-dss-server --help for the available configuration flags (each has an ALFABIS_* environment variable equivalent, for container/systemd deployments).

With Docker, this repository includes a docker-compose.yml that runs the middleware alongside an example DSS service:

docker compose up

This is intended for testing services locally before submitting them for production — see the service developer's quick-start guide for a full walkthrough.

License

Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE.