Sci Data. 2018 Jun 19;5:180110. doi: 10.1038/sdata.2018.110.

MEG-BIDS, the brain imaging data structure extended to magnetoencephalography.

Niso G^1,², Gorgolewski KJ³, Bock E¹, Brooks TL³, Flandin G⁴, Gramfort A^5,⁶, Henson RN⁷, Jas M⁵, Litvak V⁴, T Moreau J¹, Oostenveld R^8,⁹, Schoffelen JM⁸, Tadel F^1,^10,¹¹, Wexler J³, Baillet S¹.

Author information

1: McConnell Brain Imaging Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal QC, H3A 2B4, Canada.
2: Center for Biomedical Technology, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 28223 Madrid, Spain.
3: Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
4: The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL Institute of Neurology, UK.
5: LTCI, Telecom ParisTech, Université Paris-Saclay, 75013 Paris, France.
6: INRIA, Université Paris-Saclay.
7: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 7EF, UK.
8: Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands.
9: NatMEG, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.
10: Inserm, U1216, F-38000, Grenoble, France.
11: Univ. Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble Institut des Neurosciences, GIN, F-38000 Grenoble, France.

Abstract

We present a significant extension of the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) to support the specific aspects of magnetoencephalography (MEG) data. MEG measures brain activity with millisecond temporal resolution and unique source imaging capabilities. So far, BIDS was a solution to organise magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. The nature and acquisition parameters of MRI and MEG data are strongly dissimilar. Although there is no standard data format for MEG, we propose MEG-BIDS as a principled solution to store, organise, process and share the multidimensional data volumes produced by the modality. The standard also includes well-defined metadata, to facilitate future data harmonisation and sharing efforts. This responds to unmet needs from the multimodal neuroimaging community and paves the way to further integration of other techniques in electrophysiology. MEG-BIDS builds on MRI-BIDS, extending BIDS to a multimodal data structure. We feature several data-analytics software that have adopted MEG-BIDS, and a diverse sample of open MEG-BIDS data resources available to everyone.