Cocoa Framework (OpenStep, GNUStep, NextStep) -- an object-oriented and cross-platform framework for developing a graphical user interface.
Objective-C language -- an object-oriented language that has the benefits of C++ but without its complexity. Objective-C language also provides powerful memory management. The open-source and cross-platform compiler ‘‘GNU CompilerCollection’’ (GCC) is used to compile this Objective-C framework.
VTK (Visualization Toolkit) -- an object-oriented open-source and cross-platform library for 3D image processing and visualization that is widely adopted in the scientific community. This toolkit offers a large number of functions for the manipulation and display of 3D datasets.
ITK (Insight Toolkit) -- an extended set of libraries for specific medical image processing. It is an extension of the VTK library and is based on the same framework. It was developed to solve some of today’s problems in medical imaging such as image segmentation and multimodality image registration. It provides a full set of 2D and 3D processing algorithms adapted for these tasks.
PixelMed (David Clunie) -- a stand-alone DICOM toolkit that implements code for reading and creating DICOM data, DICOM network and file support, a database of DICOM objects, support for display of directories, images, reports and spectra, and DICOM object validation.
Papyrus 3.0 (Digital Imaging Unit) -- public domain library developed at the University of Geneva offers all the necessary functions to read and write DICOM files including all meta-data.
DICOM Offis Toolkit -- a cross-platform library which supports the DICOM communication protocols that make it possible to query, send, retrieve, and receive DICOM images within a PACS network.
OpenGL -- an industry standard graphic library for 3D image visualization functions. With the evolution of the 3D games market, OpenGL has been adapted by graphic boards manufacturers for the personal computing market, and allows the user to take advantage of hardware acceleration by 3D graphic cards when available. It is the only truly cross-platform 3D library available that is designed for hardware acceleration.
XML-Expat -- an XML parser library written in C. It is a stream-oriented parser in which an application registers handlers for things the parser might find in an XML document.
LibTIFF -- software which provides support for the Tag Image File Format (TIFF), a widely used format for storing image data.
Jasper -- a software-based implementation of the codec specified in the emerging JPEG-2000 Part-1 standard (i.e., ISO/IEC 15444-1). The JasPer software is written in the C programming language.
LibJPEG -- a widely used free library for JPEG image compression.
Visual Map of the Open-Source Architecture of OsiriX