The BIDS Toolbox: A web service to manage brain imaging datasets

Abstract

Data sharing is a key factor for ensuring reproducibilityand transparency of scientific experiments, andneuroimaging is no exception. The vast heterogeneity of dataformats and imaging modalities utilised in the field makes it avery challenging problem. In this context, the Brain ImagingData Structure (BIDS) appears as a solution for organising anddescribing neuroimaging datasets. Since its publication in 2015,BIDS has gained widespread attention in the field, as it providesa common way to arrange and share multimodal brain images.Although the evident benefits it presents, BIDS has not beenwidely adopted in the field of MRI yet and we believe that thisis due to the lack of a go-to tool to create and managed BIDSdatasets. Motivated by this, we present the BIDS Toolbox, aweb service to manage brain imaging datasets in BIDS format.Different from other tools, the BIDS Toolbox allows the creationand modification of BIDS-compliant datasets based on MRI data.It provides both a web interface and REST endpoints for its use.In this paper we describe its design and early prototype, andprovide a link to the public source code repository