Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS): a retrospective

Both happy & proud to have played a little part (MEG-BIDS) in this collective effort to promote collaboration and structured data sharing in neuroimaging research. New retrospective paper just published in open access by MIT Press' Imaging Neuroscience.

Initiated by Prof Russ Poldrack at Stanford, BIDS was a refreshing proposal for a standardized file structure (and not yet another data format) that would be both human and machine readable, featuring both the actual brain data themselves, but also the meta-data that are crucial to their contextualization and interpretation (e.g., scanner type, basic de-identified demographics of the research volunteers, etc.).

The seminal developments of BIDS revolved around MRI structural data. We and others took the initiative to expand BIDS to functional, non-MRI data types, such as MEG. As the timeline shows below, this effort demonstrated the proof of principle of such expansion to other brain data modalities, and facilitated more community efforts towards the development and delivery of more variations of BIDS for always more diversified brain data types. So glad to see these efforts continue to bear new fruits today!