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.

The Bodily Appearance of a Virtual Partner Affects the Activity of the Action Observation and Action Monitoring Systems in a Minimally Interactive Task

Pesci UG, Moreau Q, Era V, Candidi M eNeuro, 2025 Apr 16; 12(4):ENEURO.0390-24.2025.

Pre-movement sensorimotor oscillations shape the sense of agency by gating cortical connectivity

Bertoni T, Noel JP, Bockbrader M, Foglia C, Colachis S, Orset B, Evans N, Herbelin B, Rezai A, Panzeri S, Becchio C, Blanke O, Serino A Nature Communications, 2025 Apr 16; 16:3594.

Shared pathway-specific network mechanisms of dopamine and deep brain stimulation for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease

Binns TS, Köhler RM, Vanhoecke J, Chikermane M, Gerster M, Merk T, Pellegrini F, Busch JL, Habets JG, Cavallo A, Beyer JC, Al-Fatly B, Li N, Horn A, Krause P, Faust K, Schneider GH, Haufe S, Kühn AA, Neumann WJ Nature Communications, 2025 Apr 15; 16:3587.

Representational shifts from feedforward to feedback rhythms index phenomenological integration in naturalistic vision

Chen L, Cichy RM, Kaiser D Communications Biology, 2025 Apr 14; 8:576.

Distributed Intracranial Activity Underlying Human Decision-making Behavior

Overton JA, Moxon KA, Stickle MP, Peters LM, Lin JJ, Chang EF, Knight RT, Hsu M, Saez I The Journal of Neuroscience, 2025 Apr 9; 45(15):e0572242024.

News and announcements

You can also follow us on Mastodon and BlueSky.

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.

5 June 2024

FieldTrip Cheatsheet

Jim McKay has created a Cheatsheet for FieldTrip that summarizes all the data formats, routines, and configuration options in a PDF file. You can see an example page here.

This FieldTrip Cheatsheet is FREE to all subscribers of The FUNNI Pages newsletter. Click this link to join this community for functional neuroimaging and then you can request the cheatsheet be sent to your email by clicking this link.

3 May 2024

Mats presents “reproducescript” in JOSS podcast

Mats van Es was interviewed by Arfon Smith and Abby Cabunoc Mayes for the JOSSCast, a podcast about using open source to accelerate research. Mats explains how the reproducescript option can be used with all FieldTrip functions to generate a standardized and linear analysis script that is easy to share, as explained in our recent paper Reducing the efforts to create reproducible analysis code with FieldTrip. Furthermore, they discuss MATLAB and Python, and how to reduce barriers for sharing analysis code.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify.