Introduction to BIDS Standards
Do you remember this moment you opened a brand-new dataset? Does this sheer excitement come to mind? Or do you remember first and foremost this deep sigh, when you realize the dataset is completely in chaos? You may need to spend hours in your way through this new dataset, trying to understand its structure, where to find which information, sometimes not all the information needed to interpret the data is provided.
The Brain Imaging Data Structure or BIDS (https://bids.neuroimaging.io/) was originally created as a set of rules on how to organize neuroimaging data and has since been extended to many other formats such as EEG, iEEG or MEG. Despite sounding like an unnecessary and time-consuming effort, there are many advantages of restructuring your data according to a common consensus, of which 3 major benefits stand out. Organizing your data using the BIDS standard
greatly facilitates data handling and sharing, within as well as between labs
reduces mistakes in data reading
increases efficiency when re-analyzing data in the future
For these reasons, it is important to agree on a certain standard, which is put forward by BIDS. Yet for some research fields, we might encounter data collections which the BIDS-community did not anticipate or intentionally left non-specified. The aim of these guidelines is to fill in the gaps of missing links and ambiguities in the specifications for intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) in the context of deep brain stimulation (DBS) research. Adopting the rules further below, will thus ensure that the data organization is fully compliant with each set of rules specified by BIDS. In addition, it will further solidify the standard in situations that are currently not clarified by BIDS, as this is a real need for iEEG data in large scale collaborations. However, the specifications below might still be unsatisfactory and fall short to explain how data should be organized in some particular unforeseen situations; and with the future changes in data acquisition or analysis could even be contradicting. In keeping with this seeming paradox, we made a meticulous trade-off between further solidification of the current standard on the one hand and allowing dynamic adaptations in the future on the other. A standard remains after all a work in progress.
BIDS specifications: https://bids-specification.readthedocs.io/en/stable/04-modality-specific-files/04-intracranial-electroencephalography.html