pycortex

Pycortex is a software library that allows you to visualize fMRI or other volumetric neuroimaging data on cortical surfaces.

Installation

To install the stable release version of pycortex, do the following:

# First, install some required dependencies (if not already installed)
pip install -U setuptools wheel numpy cython
# Install the latest release of pycortex from pip
pip install -U pycortex
# or, with headless rendering support:
pip install -U 'pycortex[headless]'
# or, with automatic surface flattening support (see autoflatten):
pip install -U 'pycortex[autoflatten]'
# or, with all optional features:
pip install -U 'pycortex[all]'

If you wish to install the development version of pycortex, you can install it directly from Github.

To do so, replace the second install line above with the following:

# Install development version of pycortex from github
pip install -U git+https://github.com/gallantlab/pycortex.git  --no-build-isolation

Note you will need a C compiler installed to build from scratch because there are cython code.

Documentation

Pycortex documentation is available at https://gallantlab.github.io/pycortex.

You can find many examples of pycortex features in the pycortex example gallery.

To build the documentation locally:

# Install required dependencies for the documentation
pip install sphinx_gallery numpydoc
# Move into the docs folder (assuming already in pycortex directory)
cd docs
# Build a local version of the documentation site
make html

After you run the above, you can open docs/_build/html/index.html in a web browser to view the locally built documentation.

Demo

Pycortex is best used with IPython.

If you do not already have IPython, you can install it by running:

pip install ipython

To run the pycortex demo, using IPython, run:

$ ipython
In [1]: import cortex
In [2]: cortex.webshow(cortex.Volume.random("S1", "fullhead"))

Citation

If you use pycortex in published work, please cite the pycortex paper:

Gao JS, Huth AG, Lescroart MD and Gallant JL (2015) Pycortex: an interactive surface visualizer for fMRI. Front. Neuroinform. 9:23. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2015.00023

Metadata

Release files for pycortex 1.4.0

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for pycortex 1.4.0
File	Size	Uploaded
pycortex-1.4.0.tar.gz	69.9 MB	Oct 2, 2026	Details

Release files / pycortex-1.4.0.tar.gz

Download URL	pycortex-1.4.0.tar.gz
Size	69.9 MB
Tags	Source
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums	`9fdb292a2df96bba6087ee07d428969ba1eb07ed03724bcfaca96ec8e28a5fd5`
BLAKE2b-256 checksum How to use checksums	`5d1a8f4fb7674ea9f29780f991677ee7282758dacbacbdb5029eeb001fb7fb78`
Upload date	Oct 2, 2026
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing?	Yes
Uploaded via	`twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14`

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