[Brainstorm] Handeling demographics data

[Edouard2laire]

Hi.

Today there is no structure in brainstorm that can handle demographic data such as sex or age. As we might need it to perform group analysis I think it could be a good idea to discuss our need here before submitting the idea to brainstorm.

So i thought we could add a a new structure in the subject structure to handle those data. For example :

[sSubject,iSubject]=bst_get('Subject', 'S01')
age= sSubject.demographics.age;

Moreover, having access to demographics data could be usefull to process the MBLL.
Best,
Edouard

[thomas-vincent]

Hello,

I think we should align with BIDS for this, see http://bids.neuroimaging.io/bids_spec.pdf and look for participants.tsv. Using a table with all participants is more convenient that splitting the info by subject: it's easier to load data, to spot missing data and to review.

Brainstorm made efforts to support BIDS for MEG data, see https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2018110. However, they do not handle the participants table (I checked in the code, they only load subject-specific data files).

When reading the BIDS spec, it seems there is no standard specification for columns in participants.tsv. Instead, it relies on a side-car json file which provides some guidelines but does not seem to contain hard formatting constraints.

As to where to store this participant information, I would rather create a table in @group, since we'd load everything at once for all subjects.
Let's draft something on our side (wiki+code) and then ask people from brainstorm if they'd like to integrate.