PySurfer is a Python module for interacting with a cortical surface representations of neuroimaging data from Freesurfer. It extends Mayavi's powerful visualization engine with a high-level interface for working with MRI and MEG data.

PySurfer offers both a command-line interface designed to broadly replicate Freesurfer's Tksurfer program as well as a Python library for writing scripts to efficiently explore complex datasets.

To goal of the project is to facilitate the production of figures that are both beautiful and scientifically informative.

• Official source code repository: https://github.com/nipy/PySurfer
• Online documentation (stable): http://pysurfer.github.com/
• NITRC page: http://www.nitrc.org/projects/pysurfer
• Freesurfer: http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/
• Mailing list: http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/nipy-devel

This packages uses distutils, which is the default way of installing python modules. To install in your home directory, use:

python setup.py install --home

To install for all users on Unix/Linux:

python setup.py build
sudo python setup.py install

For information about dependencies, please see the online documentation: http://pysurfer.github.com/install.html

Available under the BSD (3-clause) license.

You can launch the test suite for the io library using nosetests from the source folder.

For the visualization module the best way to test is to build the documentation, which will run the example scripts and automatically generate static image output. From the source directory:

cd doc/
make clean
make html

The resulting documentation will live at _build/html/index.html, which can be compared to the online docs.

Either method will work only if you have Freesurfer installed on your machine with a valid SUBJECTS_DIR folder.