Nilearn: Add an option for displaying plots in radiological rather than neurological view

[jclauneuro]

Relatively new to nilearn and was hoping to adopt this tool for displaying plots in a more reproducible way. The default plotting view is in neurological convention (left-is-left), but is there a possibility of providing an option for radiological view (left-is-right)?

From what I can gather from the (excellent!) documentation and neurostars, this functionality does not currently exist: https://neurostars.org/t/how-to-control-displayed-orientation-in-nilearn-plots/1408

[GaelVaroquaux]

Given that nilearn is used by many different populations, with different expectations, I think that adding such an option would indeed be a good thing.

We would welcome a pull request from anybody, adding a 'radiological=False' option to the various plotting function. We will review and give advice to help the merge.

[willtack]

I want to bring up this issue again. I'm using the plot_glass_brain function to display a statistical map which will be read by a radiologist as part of a clinical pipeline, and it would ideal to be able to display in radiological (RPI) orientation.

I've forked the Repo and, to get started, added some code to displays.py to assign the L and R labels depending on a specified orientation (hopefully).

I'm not sure where to go from here though; some direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all you do!

[jclauneuro]

Great! On my list, but just haven't had time to personally look into this. Agree that this would be helpful for presenting data to users more on the clinical side

[GaelVaroquaux]

Given how nilearn has spread and is popular, I am +1 on integrating this today.

As a pointer, it probably should be done by using ax.invert_axis in places such as https://github.com/nilearn/nilearn/blob/master/nilearn/plotting/displays.py#L107

Also, for this feature to be accepted, it will need to be exposed in all the nilearn.plotting.plot_* functions, be documented (at least in the docstrings of these functions), and be illustrated in an example (for instance adding a line to an existing example that demoes plotting functions).