v1.0.0 — EMBC 2026

[1.0.0] — 2026-04-17

Initial public release of SlicerRoboTMS, accompanying the paper accepted at EMBC 2026:

Bai, W., Guo, Y., Basu, B., Weightman, A., & Li, Z. (2026). SlicerRoboTMS: An Open-Source 3D Slicer Extension for Robot-Assisted Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. IEEE EMBC 2026.

Added

Extension modules

• Calibration — hand-eye calibration between the Intel RealSense D455 tracking camera and the Franka Research 3 robot base using AprilTag fiducial markers; calibration command/status exchange via OpenIGTLink STATUS messages
• Registration — anatomical landmark-based MRI-to-patient registration using five predefined landmarks; reference point cloud transmitted to ROS via OpenIGTLink POLYDATA messages
• Navigation — real-time MRI-guided neuronavigation; user-defined markup plane on MRI volume used to compute and transmit a coil target pose to the robot; live MRI slice views track head movement at 30 Hz

Shared infrastructure

• BaseLogic — shared OpenIGTLink connection management, scene initialisation, and state-polling base class for all module logic classes
• BaseWidget — shared UI/timer base class providing a 30 Hz Qt timer and common widget lifecycle hooks
• URDFParser — URDF-to-Slicer-scene loader that parses robot joint hierarchy and instantiates STL model nodes with correct transforms
• LoggingUtils — per-module file and console logging with configurable log directory
• PathSetup — runtime path resolution for models, URDFs, MRI data, and log directories
• Config.py — central configuration file for OpenIGTLink connection settings, model file names, update rates, and visualisation colours

Assets

• Franka Research 3 link mesh files (models/fr3/) and full robot URDF (urdfs/fr3.urdf)
• TMS coil, fixture, registration pen, and RealSense D455 STL models (models/)
• Head phantom and MRI brain surface STL models (models/)
• Example MRI volume in NIfTI format (mri_data/mri.nii)

Communication

• OpenIGTLink over TCP/IP (default port 18944) as the sole inter-layer protocol
• Three message types: TRANSFORM for spatial data, POLYDATA for geometric objects, STATUS for commands and readiness flags
• Scene updates driven by a Qt timer at 30 Hz, matching optical tracking system refresh rates

Third-party submodules

• OpenIGTLink v3.0 (94244fe)
• ROS-IGTL-Bridge (72c5930)
• 3D Slicer v5.8.1 (11eaf62)
• franka_description v1.0.2 (4b8948e)

Developer tooling

• GitHub Actions CI: linting (flake8, pylint) and unit tests across Python 3.8–3.11
• pre-commit hooks: Flake8, Pylint, trailing-whitespace removal, end-of-file normalisation, YAML validation, large-file guard
• pyproject.toml with full package metadata and PyPI classifiers