Modality-agnostic files

Dataset description

Template: dataset_description.json README CHANGES

`dataset_description.json`

The file dataset_description.json is a JSON file describing the dataset. Every dataset MUST include this file with the following fields:

Field name	Definition
Name	REQUIRED. Name of the dataset.
BIDSVersion	REQUIRED. The version of the BIDS standard that was used.
License	RECOMMENDED. What license is this dataset distributed under? The use of license name abbreviations is suggested for specifying a license. A list of common licenses with suggested abbreviations can be found in Appendix II.
Authors	OPTIONAL. List of individuals who contributed to the creation/curation of the dataset.
Acknowledgements	OPTIONAL. Text acknowledging contributions of individuals or institutions beyond those listed in Authors or Funding.
HowToAcknowledge	OPTIONAL. Instructions how researchers using this dataset should acknowledge the original authors. This field can also be used to define a publication that should be cited in publications that use the dataset.
Funding	OPTIONAL. List of sources of funding (grant numbers)
ReferencesAndLinks	OPTIONAL. List of references to publication that contain information on the dataset, or links.
DatasetDOI	OPTIONAL. The Document Object Identifier of the dataset (not the corresponding paper).

Example:

{
  "Name": "The mother of all experiments",
  "BIDSVersion": "1.0.1",
  "License": "CC0",
  "Authors": [
    "Paul Broca",
    "Carl Wernicke"
  ],
  "Acknowledgements": "Special thanks to Korbinian Brodmann for help in formatting this dataset in BIDS. We thank Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley for helpful comments and discussions about the experiment and manuscript; Hermann Ludwig Helmholtz for administrative support; and Claudius Galenus for providing data for the medial-to-lateral index analysis.",
  "HowToAcknowledge": "Please cite this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/001012092119281",
  "Funding": [
    "National Institute of Neuroscience Grant F378236MFH1",
    "National Institute of Neuroscience Grant 5RMZ0023106"
  ],
  "ReferencesAndLinks": [
    "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/001012092119281",
    "Alzheimer A., & Kraepelin, E. (2015). Neural correlates of presenile dementia in humans. Journal of Neuroscientific Data, 2, 234001. http://doi.org/1920.8/jndata.2015.7"
  ],
  "DatasetDOI": "10.0.2.3/dfjj.10"
}

`README`

In addition a free form text file (README) describing the dataset in more details SHOULD be provided. The README file MUST be either in ASCII or UTF-8 encoding.

Version history of the dataset (describing changes, updates and corrections) MAY be provided in the form of a CHANGES text file. This file MUST follow the CPAN Changelog convention: http://search.cpan.org/~haarg/CPAN-Changes-0.400002/lib/CPAN/Changes/Spec.pod. The CHANGES file MUST be either in ASCII or UTF-8 encoding.

Example:

1.0.1 2015-08-27
 - Fixed slice timing information.

1.0.0 2015-08-17
 - Initial release.

Participants file

Template:

participants.tsv
participants.json
phenotype/<measurement_tool_name>.tsv
phenotype/<measurement_tool_name>.json

Optional: Yes

The purpose of this file is to describe properties of participants such as age, handedness, sex, etc. In case of single session studies this file has one compulsory column participant_id that consists of sub-<label>, followed by a list of optional columns describing participants. Each participant needs to be described by one and only one row.

participants.tsv example:

participant_id  age sex group
sub-control01 34  M control
sub-control02 12  F control
sub-patient01 33  F patient

If the dataset includes multiple sets of participant level measurements (for example responses from multiple questionnaires) they can be split into individual files separate from participants.tsv. Those measurements should be kept in phenotype/ folder and end with the .tsv extension. They can include arbitrary set of columns, but one of them has to be participant_id with matching sub-<label>. As with all other tabular data, those additional phenotypic information files can be accompanied by a JSON file describing the columns in detail (see here). In addition to the column description, a section describing the measurement tool (as a whole) can be added under the name MeasurementToolMetadata. This section consists of two keys: Description - a free text description of the tool, and TermURL a link to an entity in an ontology corresponding to this tool. For example (content of phenotype/acds_adult.json):

{
  "MeasurementToolMetadata": {
    "Description": "Adult ADHD Clinical Diagnostic Scale V1.2",
    "TermURL": "http://www.cognitiveatlas.org/task/id/trm_5586ff878155d"
  },
  "adhd_b": {
    "Description": "B. CHILDHOOD ONSET OF ADHD (PRIOR TO AGE 7)",
    "Levels": {
      "1": "YES",
      "2": "NO"
    }
  },
  "adhd_c_dx": {
    "Description": "As child met A, B, C, D, E and F diagnostic criteria",
    "Levels": {
      "1": "YES",
      "2": "NO"
    }
  }
}

Please note that in this example MeasurementToolMetadata includes information about the questionnaire and adhd_b and adhd_c_dx correspond to individual columns.

In addition to the keys available to describe columns in all tabular files (LongName, Description, Levels, Units, and TermURL) the participants.json file as well as phenotypic files can also include column descriptions with Derivative field that, when set to true, indicates that values in the corresponding column is a transformation of values from other columns (for example a summary score based on a subset of items in a questionnaire).

Scans file

Template:

sub-<label>/[ses-<label>/]
    sub-<label>[_ses-<label>]_scans.tsv

Optional: Yes

The purpose of this file is to describe timing and other properties of each imaging acquisition sequence (each run .nii[.gz] file) within one session. Each .nii[.gz] file should be described by at most one row. Relative paths to files should be used under a compulsory filename header. If acquisition time is included it should be under acq_time header. Datetime should be expressed in the following format 2009-06-15T13:45:30 (year, month, day, hour (24h), minute, second; this is equivalent to the RFC3339 "date-time" format, time zone is always assumed as local time). For anonymization purposes all dates within one subject should be shifted by a randomly chosen (but common across all runs etc.) number of days. This way relative timing would be preserved, but chances of identifying a person based on the date and time of their scan would be decreased. Dates that are shifted for anonymization purposes should be set to a year 1900 or earlier to clearly distinguish them from unmodified data. Shifting dates is recommended, but not required.

Additional fields can include external behavioral measures relevant to the scan. For example vigilance questionnaire score administered after a resting state scan.

Example:

filename  acq_time
func/sub-control01_task-nback_bold.nii.gz 1877-06-15T13:45:30
func/sub-control01_task-motor_bold.nii.gz 1877-06-15T13:55:33

Code

Template: code/*

Source code of scripts that were used to prepare the dataset (for example if it was anonymized or defaced) MAY be stored here.¹ Extra care should be taken to avoid including original IDs or any identifiable information with the source code. There are no limitations or recommendations on the language and/or code organization of these scripts at the moment.

¹Storing actual source files with the data is preferred over links to external source repositories to maximize long term preservation (which would suffer if an external repository would not be available anymore).