BrainVoyager 21.2 and BIDS compatability

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Hello everyone,

I recently used Brainvoyager 21.2 to put a dataset into BIDS format. In the .json’s for functional tasks there are three parameters I am curious if we can leave in their current format for uploading the data to OpenNeuro.

First, the “SliceTiming” parameter is called “SliceTimingTable”. Is this okay or does this column have to be renamed to be ‘SliceTiming’? Moreover, the slice timing seems to be based off of milliseconds instead of seconds (e.g. slice timing is 505.5 when the same data converted with dcm2niix has a slice timing of 0.5055). Is this acceptable for posting on OpenNeuro?

Second, there is a column titled “AcquisitionTime”, which refers to the clock time the scan was taken (in hhmmss.fs format, e.g. 101000.00000 = 10:10am) . Can we leave this data in or do we have to remove it?

Third, BrainVoyager also retains the SeriesNumber (e.g. series 2) and study title from the scanner, can this info be retained?

Thanks so much (and my apologies if these questions have been addressed somewhere else),
Mike

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Hi @Michael_Slipenkyj,

For SliceTimingTable, you’re going to need to change this to SliceTiming, and it will need to be in seconds. See Timing parameters.

For AcquisitionTime, this does not appear to be in the spec at all. I think the closest thing we have is the Scans file.

Could you be more explicit about SeriesNumber and study title? The latter sounds like a good entry in dataset_description.json, but I’m not sure what SeriesNumber corresponds to.

Also, I’d recommend using the BIDS validator to check your metadata (it runs in your browser and doesn’t upload your data anywhere). It sounds like BrainVoyager is producing some non-standard metadata, so it would be good to check it.

Best,
Chris