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 built from the source code.

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

After installing SimpleITK, we recommend going over the latest tutorial 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. We are also working towards supporting R packaging.

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 virtual environment 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)

From the command line prompt, execute:

conda install -c simpleitk simpleitk

Beta and release candidate packages are also available on Anaconda cloud under the dev label:

conda install -c simpleitk/label/dev simpleitk

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 setup SimpleITK with 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 setup SimpleITK with Java.

R binary files

R binaries are currently only available for Linux and Mac.

SimpleITK/R is installed using a devtools based installer (GitHub Repository). Strictly speaking, this is not a binary distribution, but it is a convenient way of automatically compiling and installing on a system.

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

devtools::install_github("SimpleITK/SimpleITKRInstaller")

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