BIDS

A simple and intuitive way to organize and describe your neuroimaging and behavioral data.

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a standard for organizing and describing neuroimaging and behavioral data. The standard describes how to organize imaging data (such as NIfTI files), acquisition metadata, subject and session data, and other associated information in structured files and a directory structure.

Development status

BIDS is a mature standard widely adopted by the neuroimaging community. Working groups actively maintain and update the standard.

Innovation

BIDS broadens the idea of a data format to standardize the organization of levels of data not usually addressed by traditional formats. BIDS focuses on data organization and not the definition of data elements: by not trying to solve every outstanding problem, BIDS is able to effectively addresses certain issues of data interchange.

Citation information

Gorgolewski, K. J., Auer, T., Calhoun, V. D., Craddock, R. C., Das, S., Duff, E. P., Flandin, G., Ghosh, S. S., Glatard, T., Halchenko, Y. O., Handwerker, D. A., Hanke, M., Keator, D., Li, X., Michael, Z., Maumet, C., Nichols, B. N., Nichols, T. E., Pellman, J., … Poldrack, R. A. (2016). The brain imaging data structure, a format for organizing and describing outputs of neuroimaging experiments. Scientific Data, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.44

RRID:SCR_016124

How to use

Ideally the details of BIDS are transparent to the end user.

Some tools that produce BIDS are:

  • HeuDiConv
  • dcm2niix
  • BIDScoin
  • BIDSkit
  • BIDifier

Some tools that consume BIDS are:

  • fMRIPrep
  • MRIQC
  • dMRIprep
  • OpenNeuro

It is possible to interact with BIDS using:

  • BIDS Validator
  • PyBIDS

Links

Representative publications