Typically the sampled representation is an image acquired from such medical instrumentation as CT or MRI scanners.

ITK was developed with funding from the National Library of Medicine (U.S.) as an open resource of algorithms for analyzing the images of the Visible Human Project.

ITK's NLM Project Manager was Dr. Terry Yoo, who coordinated the six prime contractors who made up the Insight Software Consortium.

The Principal Investigators for these partners were, respectively, Bill Lorensen at GE CRD, Will Schroeder at Kitware, Vikram Chalana at Insightful, Stephen Aylward with Luis Ibáñez at UNC (both of whom subsequently moved to Kitware), Ross Whitaker with Josh Cates at UT (both now at Utah), and Dimitris Metaxas at UPenn (Dimitris Metaxas is now at Rutgers University).

In addition, several subcontractors rounded out the consortium including Peter Ratiu at Brigham & Women's Hospital, Celina Imielinska and Pat Molholt at Columbia University, Jim Gee at UPenn's Grasp Lab, and George Stetten at University of Pittsburgh.

Typically the sampled representation is an image acquired from such medical instrumentation as CT or MRI scanners.

In addition, an automated wrapping process generates interfaces between C++ and other programming languages such as Java and Python.

Because ITK is an open-source project, developers from around the world can use, debug, maintain, and extend the software.

Extreme programming collapses the usual software creation methodology into a simultaneous and iterative process of design-implement-test-release.

In ITK, an extensive testing process (using CDash) is in place that measures the quality on a daily basis.

The Insight Toolkit was initially developed by six principal organizations and three subcontractors After its inception the software continued growing with contributions from other institutions including The funding for the project is from the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

These publications are made freely available through the Insight Journal Because ITK is an open-source system, anybody can make contributions to the project.

In 2004 ITK-SNAP (website) was developed from SNAP and became a popular free segmentation software using ITK and having a nice and simple user interface.