Overview

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a way to arrange your imaging data along with associated metadata in a human-readable way. Ordering your data in a standard way facilitates sharing data with others. Beyond that, there is a plethora of standard (reproducible) processing pipelines (called BIDSApps) readily available that interface with any dataset in BIDS format.

The standard is continuously expanded to further modalities (sMRI, dMRI, fMRI, MEG, EEG, …) as well as results from standard processing steps (called ‘derivatives’).

Conversion to BIDS

There are many tools that support the user in converting existing data to BIDS format. The most common usecase for us is the conversion from the DICOM format (the format in which we receive our MRI data) to BIDS. A good choice of conversion software is BIDSCoin which provides a way of creating an MRI protocol-specific template for automatic conversion while facilitating the template creation through a graphical interface.

BIDS validation

After having created (or augmented) a BIDS dataset, it is good practice to assert that the BIDS specification is satisfied. For this purpose, the tool BIDS-validator can be used to check if the standard is followed and provides a report over all violations and the available data entities.

Resources

• Main page for all BIDS-related resources: link
• Collection of BIDSApps: link
• BIDSCoin conversion software: link
• BIDS validator tool: link
• BIDS starter kit as an entry point to the BIDS universe: link
• Full specification of the BIDS standard: link

Examples

Ask your lab mates for example data sets in BIDS format that we use in the lab.