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Getting Started

Welcome to SimpleITK!

SimpleITK provides a simplified interface to ITK in a variety of languages. A user can either download pre-built binaries, if they are available for the desired platform and language, or SimpleITK can be :ref:`built from the source code<building_simpleitk>`.

In the following sections we describe how to install SimpleITK and auxiliary software tools.

After installing SimpleITK, we recommend going over the :ref:`latest tutorial <lbl_tutorials_courses>` and skimming the Doxygen pages for more information.

Downloading the binaries

One of the great advantages of SimpleITK is that (typically) the user does not have to build it — he or she can simply download the binaries and get started right away!

Currently, Python binaries are available on Microsoft Windows, GNU Linux and Mac OS X. C# and Java binaries are available for Windows. R binaries are not available but a convenient devtools based installer for Linux and Mac is.

Python binary files

There are currently two Python binary package choices: Python Wheels, and Anaconda packages for the Anaconda Python distribution. We recommend the use of a :ref:`virtual environment <FAQ-virtualenv>` for installation of SimpleITK.

Wheels for Generic Python Distribution

From the command line use the pip program to install a binary wheel:

pip install SimpleITK

This installation requires a recent version of pip (>=9.0), to properly detect compatibility with the PEP 427 tags in the wheel filenames. Pip can be updated using pip install -U pip. Also the Python environment must be compatible with one of the pre-compiled binary wheels.

Alternatively, the wheels can be manually downloaded from GitHub releases or PyPI, and then installed with pip.

Conda-based distributions (Anaconda, Miniconda)

SimpleITK Conda binaries are available for the conda-forge ecosystem. To get started run the following command:

conda create --name sitk python=3.11 simpleitk --channel conda-forge --override-channels
conda activate sitk

This will create and activate a new conda environment named sitk with Python 3.11 and SimpleITK installed from the Anaconda conda-forge channel. The version of python can be changed to any supported version.

The above create command creates an environment which only used the conda-forge channel. This follows Conda-forge's recommendation to not mix the defaults channel with the conda-forge channel. Mixing the channels can cause package dependency issues, missing libraries, and a non-functional virtual environment. Alternatively, the miniforge installer can be used to create dedicated conda-forge environments.

C# binary files

Binaries for select C# platforms can be found on SimpleITK's GitHub releases under the appropriate version. Installing the library should only involve importing the unzipped files into the C# environment. The files have the following naming convention:

SimpleITK-version-CSharp-buildplatform-targetplatform.zip

e.g.

SimpleITK-1.2.4-CSharp-win64-x64.zip

Details about how to set up a C# Visual Studio project with SimpleITK can be found in the :ref:`setup SimpleITK with CSharp <setup-csharp>` page.

Java binary files

Binaries for select Java platforms can be found on SimpleITK's GitHub releases page under the appropriate version. Installation instructions are available at :ref:`setup SimpleITK with Java <setup-java>`.

R binary files

R binaries are not available.

For Linux and Mac one can easily build and install SimpleITK from source using a devtools based installer referencing this GitHub Repository.

This installation requires R devtools, CMake, git, and a compiler in the path.

One line commands to build and install the package:

devtools::install_github("SimpleITK/SimpleITKRInstaller")

or using six cores for compilation (change this number based on your hardware):

devtools::install_github("SimpleITK/SimpleITKRInstaller", args=c("--configure-vars=MAKEJ=6"))

Latest binaries

If the latest SimpleITK bug fixes and features are required then pre-release binaries are available. The pre-release binaries are built from the actively developed master branch. The SimpleITK packages are available on Github releases under the "latest" tag. The packages include Python, CSharp and Java. To upgrade to the latest pre-release Python binary package run:

pip install --upgrade --pre SimpleITK --find-links https://github.com/SimpleITK/SimpleITK/releases/tag/latest

Recommended Software

Fiji (Fiji is Just ImageJ)

SimpleITK has a built in function, itk::simple::Show(), which can be used for viewing images in an interactive session. By default this Show function searches for an installed Fiji to display images. If Fiji is not found, then it searches for ImageJ. Fiji/ImageJ were chosen because they can handle all the image types that SimpleITK supports, including 3D vector images with n components per pixel.

The Show function searches for Fiji/ImageJ in a number of standard locations. The exact locations depend on the system type (Linux, Mac or Windows). Enabling the "debugOn" option to "Show", allows the user to see where SimpleITK is searching for Fiji (or other viewing application) and the actual command used to launch the viewing application.

Show is a functional interface to the ImageViewer class. Other viewing applications can be configured using an ImageViewer object, see the following section of the :ref:`FAQ`:

:ref:`alt_viewer`.

IPython and Jupyter

For python users, IPython with Jupyter is a terrific environment to perform interactive computing for image processing. The addition of the numpy and scipy packages creates a powerful interactive development environment.

We have instructional SimpleITK Jupyter Notebooks which can help a user get started.