Why server?

[dzenanz]

Technically, this application did not have to be split into a client (regular slicer extension) and a server (which does the inference). I assume the splitting was done to remove the long GUI freezes which would result from waiting for image embeddings to be computed. Is this correct?

[rasakereh]

Thanks for asking. Actually GUI freezes can be eliminated using run_on_background function. There are several reasons behind our decision:

• It is way faster to load the module with smaller code base.
• We are planning to add GPU support and if your computer is not gpu friendly you would be able to run server on a compatible workstation
• Slicer does not support virtual environments and we have version clashes with tensorflow, etc. We want to leave a room to dockerize the tensorflow-dependant part

[dzenanz]

Thanks for the answer.