A few weeks ago (October 17th-19th, 2018) we hosted a 3 day meeting at Stanford University to further extend the BIDS standard to describe statistical model specifications of neuroimaging analyses. We invited a diverse international group representing different platforms and groups (i.e. AFNI, NIDM, Gigantum) whose work would benefit from a standard for statistical models. The goal of this meeting was to solidify the current draft of the proposal.

The structure of the meeting arose organically based on the needs of the current draft proposal. The portions of the proposal in most need of attention and detail were identified collectively, and then we divided into task groups to address these items. It was also productive to categorize portions of the proposal as either belonging to a core specification or an extended one. This allowed us to focus our efforts and determine whether the different topics need to be present in the core or if those can be part of the extended specification. The statistical models currently implemented by the most widely used analysis tools can be described using the current specification. There is also sufficient flexibility to expand the specification to cover more advanced and unique models beyond general linear models and common specifications of the hemodynamic response function. We provided an online communication option (Riot) to allow off-site researchers to follow the meeting and provide their thoughts and for participants to communicate real-time across groups during the breakout sections. The work was completed through editing and suggesting directly on a shared google document of the proposal.

We have posted a summary of the decisions reached over the course of the meeting, and a timeline for moving forward with and solidifying this proposal. Briefly, we aim to have a first release candidate (RC) by the end of November. Then, our target is to have the Statistical Models proposal be merged into the main BIDS specification between February and March, 2019. This timeline was determined with the BIDS derivatives proposal solidification in mind.

We would like to thank all the participants for the wonderful discussions and great work!

Note: missing from this image – JB Poline, Jeanette Mumford, Dav Clark, Hernando Ombao, Ming Zhan, Russ Poldrack, Ross Blair, Jessey Wright, Rastko Ciric