Developer's Guide

Contributions to ZFBrain are welcome! This section gives function and class definitions used in the development of ZFBrain.

Future Development

We are currently working on implementing the following changes to ZFBrain:

  • Add more brain regions

  • Make all current and future brain regions more anatomically correct

  • Improve the shading and colors of the brain regions

  • Make the executable easier to install

  • Add a plane to see a 2D slice of the brain

Docstrings

ZFBrain uses a style derived from NumPy’s docstrings style, which includes giving the types of function arguments. The functions used to generate the ZFBrain surface can be seen in our API section.

Contributions

Follow these steps if you are interested in contributing to ZFBrain:

  • Go to our GitHub page and make your own copy of ZFBrain by clicking on the “fork” button in the top right corner.

  • Clone the project to your computer using a text editor. We recommend using the Visual Studio Code text editor, which is what we used to originally make ZFBrain. You can download a copy of the ZFBrain code on our GitHub page by pressing the green “Code” button. This will open a drop down window in which you can copy the URL by clicking on the clipboard figure. In the terminal of your text editor, type git clone and then paste the URL you copied from GitHub.

  • Make sure you are working in the correct directory by typing cd zfbrain in the terminal of the text editor.

Documentation

Documentation is generated with sphinx and hosted on ReadTheDocs. To generate documentation locally, make sure you are in the “docs” subfolder and type cmd make.bat in the terminal. Then run start make.bat in the terminal, which will open up another window. In this new terminal, type make html. Then, the documentation can be found locally in the “docs/html” folder. The “homepage” is the index.rst file.

Testing

ZFBrain uses the python unittest package for testing and Travis runs these tests on every commit. To run tests locally before submitting a PR, make sure you are in the home directory of ZFBrain and type python3 -m unittest -v.