Installation

Installation#

The mitk package is distributed as a platform-specific wheel that bundles the compiled MITK runtime together with all native dependencies. There is no need to build MITK from source to use the Python bindings.

Requirements#

  • A Python version matching one of the published wheel tags (typically CPython 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, or 3.13). The wheel is a binary build pinned to a specific CPython ABI; pip will refuse to install the wrong tag.

  • NumPy 2.0 or newer (installed automatically as a dependency).

  • A supported platform: Windows x86_64, Linux x86_64 (glibc 2.39+ / manylinux), or macOS (x86_64 and arm64).

Install#

pip install mitk-python

Note

The PyPI distribution is named mitk-python; the import name stays mitk. At the time of writing, mitk-python is not yet on PyPI. The wheel is distributed through the MITK project’s internal channels. Once a public release is available, the command above will Just Work.

To install a wheel built locally or downloaded directly:

pip install /path/to/mitk_python-<version>-<tags>.whl

Verify the install#

import mitk
print(mitk.__version__)

If the import succeeds and prints a version string, the wheel is correctly installed. The wheel bundles auto-load modules (DICOM and image-format readers/writers) that are activated transparently on import; no further setup is required.

Building from source#

Building the wheel from source is a developer-side concern; it requires the full MITK SuperBuild and is documented in the MITK developer manual under Python in MITK. The short version:

cmake -S . -B ../MITK-superbuild -DMITK_BUILD_CONFIGURATION=PythonWheel
cmake --build ../MITK-superbuild

The SuperBuild build chains into the inner MITK build, which in the PythonWheel configuration runs the mitk_python_wheel target as part of the default build. The resulting wheel lands in ../MITK-superbuild/MITK-build/.