Infrastructure for analyses and open data for securing reproducibility and data sharing in functional imaging

• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience ; Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431544102

Within the core facility Neuroimaging, the Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg runs both, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner (MRI) as well as a magnetencephalography (MEG), which are only used for human research purposes. Both were raised under the leading role of the Department of Psychology and can be used by the faculty VI for medical and health sciences. Besides those core facilities, members of the Neuroimaging Unit are able to make use of a broad variety of equipment and methods, such as various electroencephalography systems, systems for transcranial magnetic or electronic stimulation, functional near infrared spectroscopy, driving simulators for MEG and MRI as well as a virtual reality lab. This variety of techniques, data types and working groups makes it inevitable to establish a uniform, efficient and sustainable data structure, which allows for a reproducible data securement and analyses as well as a simplified data sharing between working groups and cooperation partners. Since the Neuroimaging Unit is still under development, this is the perfect time point to establish a uniform data structure. In the context of this DFG Core Facility proposal we plan to establish and further develop the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) at our University. We decided for this standard, because it is a multi-technology supporting standard, mostly used and recognized by many researchers worldwide. During the funding period of five years, work package 1 contains the introduction and establishment of the standardized data bank, whereas work package 2 should replenish the data bank by including a standardized data processing and work package 3 should finally prepare the data for meta analyses as well as data sharing. Besides that, work package 4 supports the users on different levels such as data acquisition and processing and gives them the opportunity to discuss their finding with other researchers in workshops and symposia. This proposal not only contains the establishing and usage of the BIDS standard but also, and more importantly, supports the development of so-called BIDS-Apps – an application infrastructure for development of reproducible data analyses pipelines – which are needed for the different fields of application (e.g., different types of data and analysis techniques). For this reason, the Neuroimaging Unit is further in contact with the BIDS developers. The integration of the BIDS standard within the Neuroimaging Unit and the related possibility for a joint data usage as well as the efficient and reproducible data analyses pipelines rely on newest standards and are a path-breaking technology, which allows the University Oldenburg to act as a promising cooperation partner in third-party funding.

• DFG Programme: Core Facilities
• Applicant Institution: Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg
• Participating Institution: Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg; Department für Psychologie
• Leader: Professor Dr. Jochem Rieger