Thalamus

Real-time · Closed-loop · Multimodal

Thalamus is an open-source platform for real-time, synchronized, closed-loop multimodal data capture — built for the demands of the operating room and the research lab.

Quick Start → How it works Node reference Examples

Thalamus assembles experiments from a pipeline of nodes — small, configurable units that acquire, transform, record, or control data streams. Recordings are written to a compact .tha capture file and converted to analysis-ready formats (HDF5, CSV, Parquet, …) with the bundled tooling.

If you use Thalamus in your work, please cite our paper: Thalamus: a real-time, closed-loop platform for synchronized multimodal data acquisition (Communications Engineering, Nature).

Start here

New to Thalamus? Follow this path – each step builds on the last, and the later pages (behavioral tasks, plugins) are not prerequisites for getting started.

  1. Quick Start – install Thalamus and make your first recording.

  2. Concepts & Architecture – the mental model: nodes, the data model, and the .tha capture file.

  3. Examples – analyze recordings with the bundled tools (runnable, no hardware required).

  4. Task Controller and Eye Calibration – run behavioral, gaze-contingent experiments.

  5. Command-line tools and Plugins – tune a live pipeline and extend Thalamus with native code.

Stuck? See Troubleshooting & FAQ and the Glossary.

Contents:

Indices and tables