Introduction

This module is designed to enable direct communication between ROS 2 and 3D Slicer.

The documentation is available on readthedocs: https://slicer-ros2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Please check out this video below for an overview of some of the features and use-cases.

Acknowledgement

This project is supported by:

• The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) under award number R01EB020667, and 3R01EB020667-05S1 (MPI: Tokuda, Krieger, Leonard, and Fuge). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.
• The National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

References

• 3D Slicer Official Page, https://www.slicer.org/
• ROS - Robot Operating System, https://ros.org/
• ROS for Medical Robotics, https://rosmed.github.io/
• Presentations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZBgR6te3Gs
• Workshops: ISMR 2023 - https://rosmed.github.io/ismr2023/index, ISMR 2024 - https://rosmed.github.io/ismr2024/index
• Introductory publication: Connolly L, Deguet A, Leonard S, Tokuda J, Ungi T, Krieger A, Kazanzides P, Mousavi P, Fichtinger G, Taylor RH. Bridging 3D Slicer and ROS2 for Image-Guided Robotic Interventions. Sensors (Basel). 2022 Jul 17;22(14):5336. doi: 10.3390/s22145336. PMID: 35891016; PMCID: PMC9324680.
• Most-recent publication: Connolly L, Kumar AS, Mehta KK, Al-Zogbi L, Kazanzides P, Mousavi P, Fichtinger G, Krieger A, Tokuda J, Taylor RH, Leonard S, Deguet A. SlicerROS2: A Research and Development Module for Image-Guided Robotic Interventions. IEEE Trans Med Robot Bionics. 2024 Nov;6(4):1334-1344. doi: 10.1109/TMRB.2024.3464683. [PMID: To be added]; [PMCID: To be added].

If you use SlicerROS2 and find it helpful for your research, please use the 2024 publication for citation:

@article{connolly2024slicerros2,
  title={SlicerROS2: A Research and Development Module for Image-Guided Robotic Interventions},
  author={Connolly, Laura and Kumar, Aravind S and Mehta, Kapi Ketan and Al-Zogbi, Lidia and Kazanzides, Peter and Mousavi, Parvin and Fichtinger, Gabor and Krieger, Axel and Tokuda, Junichi and Taylor, Russell H and others},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics},
  year={2024},
  publisher={IEEE}
}

v1.0

• Last version known to work with Ubuntu 20.04
• Tested on 20.04, 22.04 and 24.04
• Binaries are now installed in Slicer build tree so users don’t have to modify the module search path in Slicer
• Added code generation to automatically create vtk object mimicking ROS messages, also generates conversion methods between ROS and Slicer. New subscribers and publishers can be added in the MRML/CMakeLists.txt
• For robot visualization, added “fixed frame” to allow setting a different name for the reference frame
• crtl+c now stops slicer to be more ROS-like
• Tests now detect the ROS version and should work on Galactic, Humble and Jazzy
• Added methods to list registered (existing) publisher and subscriber nodes
• CreateAndAdd{Publisher,Subscriber}Node overloaded to accept short name (e.g. String instead of vtkMRMLROS2PublisherStringNode

v0.9

SlicerROS2 now supports ROS publishers and subscribers, Tf2 broadcasts and lookups as well as parameters (client). The robot visualization is built on top of the parameter client (to retrieve the URDF) as well as Tf2 lookups (to move the robot’s links).

Each ROS communication mechanism is encapsulated in a MRML node. These can be used in C++ as well as Python. Some simple unit tests are included in the accompanying module ROS2Tests.

Detailed documentation is available on readthedocs: https://slicer-ros2.readthedocs.io/en/latest/