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.
Please cite the FieldTrip 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, vol. 2011, Article ID 156869, 9 pages, 2011. doi:10.1155/2011/156869.
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.
21 January, 2021
FieldTrip version 20210121 has been released. It fixes a visualization bug that was recently reported for ft_rejectvisual but also for ft_databrowser. Now, once again, you can scroll your artefacts with no problems. Many thanks to Benjy Barnett. It also includes improvements for checking the grad
and elec
sensor structures, which will speed up the execution of your analyses. See GitHub for the detailed list of updates.
Selected commits
News and announcements
You can also follow us on Twitter.
18 December, 2020
Yesterday Mats van Es defended his PhD thesis “On the role of oscillatory synchrony in neural processing” and was awarded the PhD title. Congratulations!
Mats not only used FieldTrip in a number of interesting MEG studies, but also contributed as lecturer in the MEG toolkit courses. Furthermore, he recently implemented the reproducescript
functionality (which will be published soon). He continues his research at the MEG center in Oxford.
18 December, 2020
Thanks to Sander, Catarina, Casper, Julia, Christopher, Marije and Maria from the Glasgow Memory Lab for the very kind words on your postcard to the FieldTrip team. Greatly appreciated!
27 November, 2020
Regretfully we identified a bug in FieldTrip releases starting from release 20200701 onward, which might have affected your results.
Specifically, if you have been using ft_sourceanalysis
with DICS as a method, and if the order of the channels of the input data structure was not alphabetical, the results are incorrect. This is caused by an accidental alphabetical reordering of the channels in the cross-spectral density matrix, which was not reflected by a similar reordering in the leadfields. We are grateful to Alexandra Steina to help us identify and resolve it. See issue #1587 on GitHub for more information.
Are you affected? If you used a FieldTrip version between 20200701 and 20201126, and you used ft_sourceanalysis
with method DICS, and your channels are not in alphabetical order, then you are likely affected. For CTF MEG data the channels are usually in alphabetical order. Neuromag/Elekta MEG data, and MEG data from other systems often have the channels not in alphabetical order. The same holds for EEG data, so your results are likely affected if you are working with EEG data, or non-CTF MEG data.
To resolve the problem, please update to the latest 20201126 release version from the FTP server or from the GitHub release page, recompute your source estimates, and your downstream results.
20 November, 2020
fNIRS is often used in freely moving subjects and in motion research. We implemented a FieldTrip example script that makes a movie of the fNIRS signal, motion capture, and video data together. The movie demonstrates the fNIRS signals and artifacts synchronously with video data during various movements, such as walking, turning, frowning, head movements and jumping. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1OB-vTWCys.
9 October, 2020
Robert presented two new features of FieldTrip on the online LiveMEEG 2020 conference. We now have the data2bids function to help you to organize your data in the BIDS structure and to share it. Best do this before you start doing your analysis, so that your analysis scripts can be shared along with the data or publication. Furthermore, all high-level FieldTrip functions now have the cfg.reproducescript
option that allows you to create a tutorial-style analysis script of everything you do, regardless of how much your original code resembles a plate of spaghetti ;-)
The presentation includes a live demo and has been recorded; you can watch it on Crowdcast. The slides of the presentation are available on SlideShare.
17 September, 2020
We are changing our communication strategy, which is an integral part of our work! We will continue to use this website for news items and updates on releases, but we will also use Twitter more systematically and to the point. Instead of sending a tweet upon every commit (which made sense in the pre-GitHub days but not any more), we will start sending less frequent but more interesting tweets with important releases, announcements of new features, documentation updates, training events, and other interesting information! So to follow the important news, please keep checking here or follow us on Twitter.
01 July, 2020
In FieldTrip release 20200701 the low-level functions in fieldtrip/inverse
have been renamed to ft_inverse_xxx
and their input and output arguments have been cleaned up. This addresses a long-standing plan for improving the inverse modeling API. Except for the renaming of the low-level functions (which you won’t notice if you call them through the high-level ft_sourceanalysis
and ft_dipolefitting
) there are no functional changes.