Welcome to the FieldTrip website

FieldTrip is the MATLAB software toolbox for MEG, EEG and iEEG analysis, which is released free of charge as open source software under the GNU general public license. FieldTrip is developed by members and collaborators of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Please cite the reference paper when you have used FieldTrip in your study.

Robert Oostenveld, Pascal Fries, Eric Maris, and Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen. FieldTrip: Open Source Software for Advanced Analysis of MEG, EEG, and Invasive Electrophysiological Data. Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience, 2011; 2011:156869.

To get started, head over to the getting started documentation and the tutorials.

Latest release

The latest code developments can be tracked in detail on GitHub.

18 March, 2025

FieldTrip version 20250318 has been released. It contains many improvements, among others for

  • estimating the head circumference
  • reading g.tec hdf5 data
  • preprocessing in ft_badchannel, ft_badsegment and ft_baddata
  • handling of slightly invalid fif files
  • reading a source model from a fif file
  • reading VTK files
  • the _eeg.json produced by data2bids
  • the computation of the Gram matrix for SLORETA
  • TMSi electrode cap layouts
  • Micromed real-time data streaming
  • color handling
  • camera headlight for 3D rendering
  • reading SimNIBS meshes
  • updated the included iso2mesh to version 1.9.8
  • spelling in comments and help

Thanks to Maria-Carla Piastra, Tobias C. Haase, Konstantinos Tsilimparis, Julius Welzel, Christoph Pfeiffer, Bob Van Dyck, Qianqian Fang, Yaroslav Halchenko.

See GitHub for the detailed list of updates.

Recent citations

These are recent citations on Pubmed, you can find a more complete list on Google Scholar.

Criterion placement threatens the construct validity of neural measures of consciousness

Fahrenfort JJ, Johnson PA, Kloosterman NA, Stein T, van Gaal S eLife, 2025 May 28; 13:RP102335.

Neural Electrical Correlates of Subjective Happiness

Sato W, Kochiyama T, Uono S Human Brain Mapping, 2025 May 27; 46(8):e70224.

Exploring the cortical involvement in sensorimotor integration during early stages of independent walking

Koster RA, Zandvoort CS, Kerkman JN, Daffertshofer A, Dominici N Experimental Brain Research, 2025 May 26; 243(6):153.

The order of multisensory associative sequences is reinstated as context feature during successful recognition

Maack MC, Ostrowski J, Rose M Scientific Reports, 2025 May 24; 15:18120.

Reduced listening effort with adaptive binaural beamforming in realistic noisy environments

Valderrama JT, Mejia J, Wong A, Herbert NC, Edwards B Scientific Reports, 2025 May 23; 15:17998.

News and announcements

You can also follow us on Mastodon and BlueSky.

28 May 2025

During the MEG/EEG toolkit last week we noticed that some participants had issues with their MathWorks accounts to download and install the latest MATLAB version. We have now heard that MathWorks has been affected by a ransomware attack. Although our (and hopefully your) local MATLAB installations continue working just fine, it inconvenient as we are busy with preparing for the EEG workshop in Nigeria. For that workshop we want to use MATLAB online, i.e., running it all in the cloud, which would be the first time doing it like this. Let’s hope that MathWorks does not suffer too much and that they can get their systems up and running again.

7 May 2025

Together with the developers of other MEG and EEG analysis software (a.o. MNE-Python, SPM, EEGLAB) we wrote the paper Cycling on the Freeway: The perilous state of open-source neuroscience software in which we argue that the existing ecosystem of neuroscientific open-source software is brittle, and discuss why and how the neuroscience community needs to come together to ensure a healthy software ecosystem to the benefit of all. Please have a look and think about how you can contribute to the long-term continuation of projects like FieldTrip.

25 March 2025

From May 19-23 2025 we will host our annual MEG/EEG Tool-kit course in Nijmegen. During this 5-day toolkit course we will teach you advanced MEG and EEG data analysis skills. Pre-processing, frequency analysis, source reconstruction, analysis methods such as RSA and TRFs, and various statistical methods will be covered. Furthermore, we will give special attention to new opportunities in experimental design and measurements with Optically Pumped Magnetometer (OPM) systems and mobile EEG.

Preregistration is now open, see here.

25 March 2025

We have added three example scripts to the website that demonstrate how to compute EEG forward solutions. They show the similarities and differences between an analytic concentric spheres solution, a BEM solution, and a FEM solution. Furthermore, they show how to deal with geometrical units (millimeter, centimeter, meter) to get correct SI units in the forward and inverse solution.

If you have feedback on these examples, please post an issue on GitHub.

Note that there are also more elaborate tutorials using BEM and FEM for source reconstruction of EEG data.

23 November 2024

The CuttingEEG X conference at the Donders in Nijmegen and online was a great success with lots of positive feedback and interest from our 336 online + 42 onsite participants. All talks and discussions were not only live-streamed, but also recorded and are available on the CuttingEEG YouTube channel.

6 September 2024

Robert is attending and will give a keynote at the 2024 Belt and Road International Conference on Advancing Population Brain Health through Brain-Apparatus Communication in Chengdu, China. Linked to this is the Annual Assembly of the Global Brain Consortium with an online program on Zoom featuring various symposia and a number of keynotes by Aina Puce, Bradley Voytek, Paolo Rossini, Steven Luck, Viktor Jirsa, and Mahnaz Arvaneh. You still might be able to sign up for the online event that takes place this weekend.

29 August 2024

Robert and Jan-Mathijs have traveled to Sydney to attend Biomag 2024. We are enjoying lively social interactions and discussions with our friends and colleagues, and listening to interesting scientific stuff. The picture shows Robert in the ‘startblokken’ for his contribution to the pre-conference OPM workshop.