Integration with BIDScoin

[marcelzwiers]

I am the author of BIDScoin, a DICOM to BIDS converter:
https://github.com/Donders-Institute/bidscoin

Goal

BIDScoin doesn't convert physiological data but supports plugins and I was wondering how feasible it would be to write a plugin-wrapper around phys2bids tool(s) so that it integrates directly with BIDScoin.

How would that work and what would be the benefit?

BIDScoin would pass the heuristics (e.g. BIDS-labels) it extracted from the imaging source data to phys2bids, which would otherwise not be available so easily. It would allow to convert both the imaging and physiological data in one pass, making the BIDS output data more consistent. All this is a bit of a long shot from my side, since I don't know much about the working and design of phys2bids, I'm just exploring to see if there is common ground here and I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this...

Cheers,
Marcel

[smoia]

Hello @marcelzwiers , thank you for opening this issue!
I think it could be feasible to write a plugin-wrapper around phys2bids to integrate the two programs together. Remember, however, that for the moment phys2bids does not support physiological file recorded with the MRI, but only with external instruments such as Biopac and ADInstruments. This doesn't mean we won't support them in the future, but for the moment other packages that do so exist already.

This said, the main challenge I foresee would be associating the right DICOM files to the right physiological recordings. That done, passing the right labels to the main function of phy2bids should be quite easy - especially if we refactor our code as planned in #44 to have heuristic files that are a list of if ..elif statements.

We have a developer call next Thursday, as tracked in #194. Could you/would you join? We could talk about it all together.

[marcelzwiers]

For follow up, see:

• Phys2BIDScoin: Integrating BIDScoin and phys2bids for a user-friendly GUI based BIDS conversion of physiological files ohbm/hackathon2021#12
• Doubt about GUI from the plugin perspective. Donders-Institute/bidscoin#77 (to some extent)