1. Introduction: What is pybids?

1.1. What is BIDS and why should you use it?

Why use BIDS?

The Brain Imaging Data Structure provides a standard for organizing, naming, and describing neuroimaging datasets. By organizing your data in this manner, you can make sure of a number of tools that are designed to work with BIDS datasets out of the box. Moreover, many open datasets are provided in BIDS format, which means that being familiar with this structure will make it easier for you to analyze public data as well as your own.

For more information on the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS), visit https://bids.neuroimaging.io.

1.2. What is pybids and why should you use it?

Why use pybids?

Pybids makes it easier for neuroimagers who utilize the BIDS standard to query, summarize, and manipulate their data. A number of Python packages for analyzing neuroimaging data, including Nipype and nilearn, are optimized to work with BIDS datasets.

1.3. Installing pybids

Pybids is easy to install. To install the most recent release, use pip:

>>> pip install pybids

If you want the “bleeding-edge” version of pybids, you can install directly from the GitHub repository:

>>> pip install git+https://github.com/bids-standard/pybids.git

1.4. Finding help

Mailing lists and forums:

• Don’t hesitate to ask questions about pybids on NeuroStars.

• You can find help with neuroimaging in Python (file I/O, neuroimaging-specific questions) via the nipy user group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/nipy-user

• If you notice a bug in the pybids code, please open an issue in the pybids repository.