Last updated: October 21, 2012

Boundary Marking Tool (BMT)

Project Member(s): Leif Neve, Rodney Long, Sameer Antani

Overview. The Boundary Marking Tool 2 (BMT2) was developed by the National Library of Medicine in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute. The BMT2 is software that allows the manual marking of boundaries on digitized images and the recording of diagnostic or interpretive data that applies to these individual boundaries, or to the image as a whole. It has been used in multiple studies by NCI of the correlation between visual observations of the cervix and biopsy-based diagnoses. The impact of the Boundary Marking Tool in biomedical research, as well as the impact of other software tools developed in the National Library of Medicine/National Cancer Institute collaboration, is summarized here.

Installation. We provide two alternative ways to use the BMT2.

First way: Download the Bundled BMT2 (NCI Biopsy Study BMT2); this is a Microsoft Windows setup file which installs the BMT2 and all required software on your computer (namely MySQL, Tomcat and Java if necessary), and asks you to agree to a license regarding its proper use and redistribution. This is the way that the National Cancer Institute is currently using the BMT2 to mark images acquired from digital cameras, and to store the marked images locally, without requiring an Internet connection.

Second way: Run the BMT2 directly from our NLM Communications Engineering Branch website with a user account that we can provide.

While the first approach offers a bundled installation which gets you up and running quickly without requiring anything additional, the latter approach allows you to run the BMT2 on any type of computer (Mac, Linux, etc.) with Oracle's Java 1.5 or greater installed. Choose from these two approaches below:

1. Download the Bundled BMT2 (NCI Biopsy Study BMT2) setup file here. Then follow these installation instructions.

2. Request a BMT2 account here. Then launch the BMT2.