neurosurf

neurosurf is an R package for reading, manipulating, and visualizing surface-based neuroimaging data represented as triangle meshes. It focuses on surface geometry, vertex-wise data, smoothing, geodesic neighborhoods, and both static and interactive rendering workflows.

The package is under active development.

Installation

Install the development version from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("bbuchsbaum/neurosurf")

Start here

The pkgdown site includes a few good entry points:

• Introduction to NeuroSurf Data Structures
• Displaying Surfaces with RGL
• Interactive Surface Visualization with surfwidget
• Surfplot-style Figures with neurosurf
• Reference index

Development setup

neurosurf includes an interactive 3D visualization component powered by surfviewjs. The built UMD bundle is committed so devtools::install_github() works without Node; Node is only needed if you want to rebuild the JavaScript library locally.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v14 or higher)
• npm

Building surfviewjs

# Build the surfviewjs library and copy it into neurosurf
make surfview

# Check build status
make status

# Clean build artifacts
make clean-surfview

The Makefile will:

1. Install npm dependencies in surfviewjs if needed
2. Build the library with Vite
3. Copy the UMD bundle to inst/htmlwidgets/lib/neurosurface/
4. Synchronize the version number into surfwidget.yaml

Workflow integration

# Before R CMD check
make r-check

# Install package
make r-install

# Watch for changes during development
make watch-surfview  # Requires fswatch

Version management

The version number in surfwidget.yaml is synchronized with surfviewjs/package.json when make surfview runs. To update it manually:

make update-yaml
make show-version