Get involved in making BIDS better

The easiest way to contribute to BIDS is to ask questions you have about the specification on Neurostars. If your question has a bids tag it will be much easier for others to find the answer.

You can also get involved by answering questions on Neurostars!

You can contribute to the BIDS specification by opening Issues and proposing changes via Pull Requests on GitHub.

To make improvements to the website that you are reading right now, you can also open an Issue and propose changes via Pull Requests at the BIDS website GitHub repository.

There are so many ways to help us build this community. You could help someone else learn the benefits of BIDS, give a talk in your local organization, or build a BIDS App!

The only requirement is that everyone who contributes adheres to our BIDS Code of Conduct.

Thank you for your contributions!

Extending the BIDS specification

The BIDS specification can be extended in a backwards compatible way and will evolve over time. These are accomplished with BIDS Extension Proposals (BEPs), which are community-driven processes.

Do you want to learn more about extending BIDS to a new modality or set of data types? Read the Guide and follow the Submission Process.

You can also contribute to ongoing BIDS Extension Proposals. Below is a table of currently-active BEPs. The “Extension label” column provides a direct link to the documentation.

Please find our latest BEP update presented in the Open Science Room at OHBM.

Note that all of the extension ideas that are not backwards compatible and thus will have to wait for BIDS 2.0 are listed on the Issues page of the bids-2-devel GitHub repository.


Extension Title Content Lead(s) Last update
BEP004

Susceptibility Weighted Imaging (SWI)

  • raw

Looking for a new leader.
BEP011

Structural preprocessing derivatives

  • derivative

  • Viviana Siless

Opened pull request.

Features:

  • surfaces,
  • scalar maps on surfaces
  • morphometrics.

Need to conform with final Common Derivatives and gather community feedback.
BEP012

Functional preprocessing derivatives

  • derivative

  • Chris Markiewicz

Opened the pull request.

Features:

  • Derivative images (mean, ALFF, ReHo, etc.),
  • Time series (confounds, decompositions, etc.)
BEP014

Affine transformations and nonlinear field warps

  • derivative

  • Oscar Esteban

BEP016

Diffusion weighted imaging derivatives

  • derivative

  • Franco Pestilli

  • Oscar Esteban

  • Being discussed here.
  • Coordinating with BEP017.
  • Diffusion-weighted model description merged, but must comply to this.
  • Upcoming integration across DWI, Tractography, Tractometry, and Connectivity (from fMRI and DWI)
BEP017

Generic BIDS connectivity data schema

  • derivative

  • Eugene Duff

  • Current state.
  • Intended as a meeting point for minimal harmonisation of connectivity-based formats across modalities.
  • Seeking use cases spanning modalities and input defining connectivity based formats
BEP020

Eye Tracking including Gaze Position and Pupil Size

  • raw

  • Dejan Draschkow

  • BEP close to PR submission, examples and validator under development.
  • Seeking additional BEP lead to help incorporate into standard contact dejan to get involved.
BEP021

Common Electrophysiological Derivatives

  • derivative

  • Stefan Appelhoff

  • Arnaud Delorme

  • Dora Hermes

  • Mainak Jas

  • Guiomar Niso

  • Robert Oostenveld

  • Cyril Pernet

  • Discussion here UCSD to include head models with BIDS EEG data.
  • Developments of BIDS M/EEG pipelines will trigger discussion on storing derived data.
BEP022

Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS)

  • raw

  • Mark Mikkelsen

  • William Clarke

  • Martin Wilson

  • Group discussions here and here.
  • Developed NifTI standard for MRS data - presented abstract at ISMRM; manuscript in preparation.
BEP023

PET Preprocessing derivatives

  • derivative

  • Martin Noergaard

  • Graham Searle

  • Melanie Ganz

  • Work in progress following BEP009 incorporation into spec.
  • Coord. kickoff scheduled Sept. 2021 to capture various experimental designs and needs for preprocessing and pharmacokinetic modeling.
  • Focused on staying aligned with derivatives for MRI (structural, functional, ASL, diffusion)
BEP024

Computed Tomography scan (CT)

  • raw

  • Hugo Boniface

Lead seeking more contributors and experts.
BEP026

Microelectrode Recordings

  • raw

BEP is open to new leadership, see also BEP032 (animal electrophys)
BEP027

BIDS Applications 2.0

  • metadata

  • Chris Markiewicz

  • Greg Kiar

  • Focusing on: command-line conventions, I/O interface descriptors, and common behavior (for example, exit codes for failure modes); relies upon the Boutiques standard.
  • Re-conception of BIDS Apps
BEP028

Provenance

  • metadata

  • Satra Ghosh

  • Camille Maumet

  • BEP aims to provide a description of data manipulation and transformations steps related to a BIDS data element via BIDS structured sidecar JSON-LD files.
  • Can be used to describe provenance at different levels of granularity.
  • Discussions held in this repository.
  • A set of examples and user stories are being refined.
BEP029

Virtual and physical motion data

  • raw

  • Sein Jeung

  • Julius Welzel

BEP is developing and starting to finalize as discussions concerning example datasets are completed.
BEP032

Animal electrophysiology

  • raw

  • Sylvain Takerkart

  • Julia Sprenger

  • New BEP, collecting comments and community feedback which may be submitted here, directly to Sylvain & Julia, or here during the ~monthly meeting.
  • Example datasets here.
  • Supporting early stage interaction with: ProbeInterface & SpikeInterface, AnDO, interoperability with NWB and NIX data/metadata formats.
BEP033

Advanced Diffusion Weighted Imaging (aDWI)

  • raw

  • James Gholam

  • Leandro Beltrachini

  • Filip Szczepankiewicz

  • New BEP, seeking contributors and collecting community feedback relating to: priority sequences to support, best supported binary structured formats (e.g. CBOR? HDF5? MsgPack?).
  • Comments may be submitted directly on the document.
  • Generating example datasets here and determining best practice w/ vendors to record data in-sequence
BEP034

Computational modeling

  • derivative

  • metadata

  • Michael Schirner

  • Petra Ritter

BEP Computational Models: PR open for review and discussion here
BEP035

Modular extensions for individual participant data mega-analyses with non-compliant derivatives

  • derivative

  • Giuseppe Gallitto

  • Balint Kincses

  • Tamas Spisak

  • BEP revised: now collecting further comments and community feedback.
  • Collaborators with mega-analysis experience or with actual example use-cases (planned/ongoing/finished mega analyses) welcome!
BEP036

Phenotypic Data Guidelines

  • raw

  • BEP drafted.
  • Poster presentation at OHBM 2022.
  • Now collecting community comments and feedback.
  • All collaborators are welcome.
BEP037

Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation (NIBS)

  • raw

New BEP, collecting community comments and feedback. All collaborators are welcome.
BEP038

Atlases

  • raw

New BEP, collecting community comments and feedback. All collaborators are welcome.
BEP039

Dimensionality reduction-based networks

  • raw

New BEP, collecting community comments and feedback. All collaborators are welcome.
BEP040

Functional Ultrasound (fUS)

  • raw

New BEP, collecting community comments and feedback. All collaborators are welcome.

Completed BEPs

When an extension reaches maturity it is merged into the main body of the specification. Below is a table of BEPs that have been merged.

The references of the final publication for those BEPS can be found in the BIDS specification.


Extension Title Content Lead(s)
BEP001

Quantitative MRI (qMRI)

  • raw

  • Gilles de Hollander

  • Kirstie Whitaker
BEP003

Common Derivatives

  • derivative

  • Chris Markiewicz
BEP005

Arterial Spin Labeling (ASL)

  • raw

  • Henk-Jan Mutsaerts

  • Patricia Clement

  • Jan Petr

  • Marco Castellaro
BEP006

Electroencephalography (EEG)

  • raw

  • Cyril Pernet

  • Stefan Appelhoff

  • Robert Oostenveld
BEP007

Hierarchical Event Descriptor (HED) Tags

  • raw

  • Chris Gorgolewski
BEP008

Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

  • raw

  • Guiomar Niso
BEP009

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

  • raw

  • Melanie Ganz
BEP010

intracranial Electroencephalography (iEEG)

  • raw

  • Chris Holdgraf

  • Dora Hermes
BEP018

Genetic information

  • raw

  • Cyril R Pernet

  • Clara Moreau

  • Thomas Nichols
BEP030

Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS)

  • raw

  • Robert Luke

  • Luca Pollonini
BEP031

Microscopy

  • raw

  • Marie-Hélène Bourget

  • Julien Cohen-Adad


Some proposals that set out to extend the BIDS specification have instead lead to other outcomes such as:

See the table below:


Extension Title Content Lead(s) Outcome
BEP002

BIDS Models Specification

  • file format

  • Tal Yarkoni

  • Chris Markiewcz

Became an independent specification with validator to execute statistical models, with minimal configuration and intervention required from the user.
BEP013

Resting state fMRI derivatives

  • raw

  • Steven Giavasis

Merged into BEP012
BEP015

Mapping file

  • raw

  • Eric Earl

  • Camille Maumet

  • Vasudev Raguram

Became the File mapper.
BEP019

DICOM Metadata

  • metadata

  • Satrajit Ghosh

Closed in favor of possible direct support of DICOM within BIDS (see this issue and this pull request).
BEP025

Medical Imaging Data structure (MIDS)

  • raw

  • Jose Manuel

  • Saborit Torres

  • Maria de la Iglesia Vayá

Dropped from consideration; smaller parts are potentially to be included into BIDS outside of the BEP