File Formats¶
Support for data serialized in file formats are a critical bridge that facilitate comprehensive analysis with a suite of diverse software tools.
ITK-Wasm provides IO modules to work with a number of open standard scientific image and mesh file formats, These IO modules can be used to load data into language-native interfaces types in with bindings such as TypeScript and Python.
ITK-Wasm file formats¶
ITK-Wasm provides its own file formats. ITK-Wasm file formats are a performant, one-to-one mapping to the spatial interface types in a simple JSON + binary array buffer format.
Execution pipeline WebAssembly modules only support ITK-Wasm formats by default – this ensures that size of the WebAssembly pipeline binary is minimal. When using ITK-Wasm pipelines on with the command line interface, wasm modules from the image-io and mesh-io packages can transform data in other formats into the format supported by all ITK-Wasm modules.
ITK-Wasm formats can be output in a directory or bundled in a single .cbor file. The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) format supports JSON + binary array data in the data schema, is extremely small and lightweight in implementations, has support across programming languages, is highly performant, and provides a link to Web3 storage mechanisms.
ITK-Wasm file formats are available in ITK-Wasm IO functions but also in C++ via the WebAssemblyInterface ITK module. This module can be enabled in an ITK build by setting the -DModule_WebAssemblyInterface:BOOL=ON flag in CMake. And, loading and conversion is also available native-binary Python bindings via the itk-webassemblyinterface Python package.
- ITK-Wasm Image (.iwi, .iwi.cbor, .iwi.cbor.zst)
- Serialization of an
Image. - ITK-Wasm Mesh (.iwm, .iwm.cbor, .iwm.cbor.zst)
- Serialization of a
Mesh, orPolyData.