Plugin/App development guidelines/examples

[ashishsingh18]

Hi VolView Team,

First of all, thank you for the amazing tool you've developed — it's an impressive platform for visualization and interaction, and I truly appreciate the effort that has gone into making it accessible and extensible.

We are interested in developing plugins for VolView and I was wondering if you have any official guidelines, examples, or templates that could help get started.

It would be great if you could point me to:

-Any recommended structure or API for plugins.

-Example plugins or starter templates (if available).

-Best practices for integrating custom tools or workflows into VolView.

Thanks in advance for your guidance, and once again, thank you for making such a powerful tool available to the community!

Best Regards,
Ashish

[PaulHax]

Hello! Your very kind.

Instead of simply forking/branching, this repo takes a file override approach to customizing VolView:
https://github.com/KitwareMedical/VolViewCustomAppTemplate

@floryst and @jadh4v have more experence using VolViewCustomAppTemplate.

There is some work sending images back and forth from a Python server in the server directory of VolView repo proper. That code has not been mantained lately though.

What kind of plugins/modifications are you interested in? Processing images or integrations with PACS backends, etc...

[ashishsingh18]

Thank you @PaulHax for the quick and helpful response!

We’ve been exploring the VolViewCustomAppTemplate, but are currently running into issues getting it to work. My colleague @TomTonroe has also tried it, but without success so far.

If you could point us to a few key examples, using the override approach and the custom app template, especially around the following, it would be incredibly helpful:

• Modifying or extending the UI (e.g., adding custom panels, tools, buttons, labels, etc.)
• Integrating new algorithms (e.g., ITK-based image processing or custom logic)
• Adding new rendering capabilities or customizing existing visualizations

We are trying to use VolView for internal research projects, and are considering integrating it with nnInteractive for interactive segmentation. I’ve previously worked with Kitware tools like ITK, VTK, and the older desktop version of VolView, and I’m excited about the potential of the new web version of VolView as a lightweight and flexible frontend for image analysis workflows.
We'd really appreciate any additional guidance or examples you can point us to, so we can get started.

Thanks again!

Best Regards,
Ashish

[PaulHax]

Sounds like some interesting work.

The one public example we have using the VolViewCustomAppTemplate is here:
https://github.com/kitwaremedical/lungair-web-application

But there are some other things in the pipe from @arhowe00

Regarding new image processing algos, the "paint" tool has 2 different segmentation "Processes." One of them uses itk-wasm to pull in C++ ITK filters.

Regarding rendering, we don't deveate to much from vtk.js's built -in rendering. But I think it would be straightforward to copy the current 2D or 3D views and modify them.

If you would like to discuss further on a call how we can work together, happy to jump on a call with you:

paul.elliott@kitware.com