Chapter 3: Importing Data¶
Continuing from Chapter 2 — Protocols, Subjects, and Studies.
With a protocol and at least one subject created, the next step is bringing an actual recording in.
Supported formats¶
Brainstorm reads a broad range of MEG and EEG file formats directly, without conversion:
- MEG: CTF (
.ds), Elekta/MEGIN/Neuromag (.fif), KIT/Yokogawa, 4D/BTi, and several others. - EEG: European Data Format (
.edf/.edf+), BrainVision, EEGLAB (.set), Biosemi (.bdf), and generic ASCII/CSV, among many more.
This is the same category of file you saw in the MNE-Python track's Loading and Inspecting Data chapter — the same recordings, read by a different tool.
The import steps¶
- Right-click the target Subject in the Database Explorer and choose Review raw file.
- Point the file browser at your recording and select its format from the list (Brainstorm usually detects it automatically from the extension).
- Brainstorm creates a new Study for this recording and adds a "Link to raw file" entry to the tree — double-click it to open the continuous signal in the Viewer, exactly like
raw.plot()shows a recording in MNE-Python.
For EEG specifically, you'll also be prompted to align your sensors with the head — either by loading digitized 3D sensor positions if you recorded them, or by picking a default cap layout matching your electrode montage (the same concept as MNE-Python's 10–20 system montages).
What you should see afterward¶
The Subject's tree branch now contains a Study folder with the linked recording inside it. Everything you do from here — filtering, epoching, averaging, source estimation — adds further files into this same Study, so it becomes a running record of every step you've applied to this one recording session.