The authors describe some problems of the current threading method used in ITK, as well as some ways to solve them, especially through the usage of the ZThread library. He also describe how this could help to decrease the memory usage of the filter requirering a high amount of temporary memory.

The source code is provided.

I've been able to download, build and run the code with the test program. I haven't been able to validate the result produced, as the author doesn't provide the expected data. I would suggest checking the output image in the test to be sure that the produce image is the expected one.

ITK and ZThread - both are fully open source.

The code is well described but, because it changes the thread management in the end classes, it is difficult to reuse.

The author says that the code should build on all reasonable platforms excepted SGI. It would have been great to compare the ZThread supported platforms and the ITK supported ones to show that ZThread can be a suitable library for ITK.

The idea presented here can be used everywhere where threading is usable in ITK, which make it highly interesting, especially with the cheap multicore architecture currently available.

I find the ideas in that paper very interesting. However, they lack of the necessary evidence on the usable plateforms, or on the efficiency of the ZThread usage in ITK (with timing comparisons). Also, the way to split the image in more zones than the number of theads looks very interesting, and can be useful even in non threaded environment. But I can't find a modified class which implement that in a reusable way in the contribution.

Good ideas, but they should be better implemented and tested.