BEP026: Microelectrode Recordings

[rob-luke]

Dear BIDS (@bids-standard/steering) and microelectrode recordings community,

I would like to reinvigorate the microelectrode recording BIDS extension proposal and take leadership of this extension. I offer this as part of the team at AE Studio (@agencyenterprise). We have relationships with industry and academic partners in the space and extensive experience with BIDS and NWB specifications.

Note: the above is a summary of an email discussion between the steering committee and myself. It is placed here for transparency.

A rough plan of attack for how we can kick start this proposal:

• Meet with the BEP032 leads and discuss overlap in specs and learn from their experiences (scheduled)
• Engage the microelectrode recordings community and socialise that the BEP is under development again (perhaps find a co-lead if someone is interested). Direct people to this GitHub issue.
• Review the existing proposal document and make direct edits based on comments in the document and discussion with BEP032 leads. This may be a fairly large change to certain sections of the document.
• Hold an online meeting to engage with the broader community and discuss requirements and use cases from different groups.
• Convert some datasets based on the early specification document and note issues. Develop an NWB to BIDS converter that works with data from the DANDI archive.
• Revise specification document
• Gather initial feedback from the wider community
• From here we will move to a refinement stage and iterate through rounds of feedback and document improvement. Work on the validator. Create example datasets. etc.

Please use this issue to provide feedback, express your enthusiasm for the extension proposal, offer support, highlight specific use cases that might be relevant for the proposal, etc. I will keep this top comment updated as the plan evolves. We look forward to working with the BIDS team and microelectrode recording community and pushing this extension forward.

[sappelhoff]

I don't have experience with this modality but I am happy you are willing to take the responsibility to lead this BEP onwards. I'll continue to support it with regards to general BIDS questions and discussions. :-)

PS: Perhaps you need to explicitly ping (and/or email) the people you want to comment on this.

[rob-luke]

Thanks @sappelhoff your contributions are always substantial and greatly appreciated.

PS: Perhaps you need to explicitly ping (and/or email) the people you want to comment on this.

I have pinged a few people via email to ask them without applying public pressure. I will ping here publicly in the coming weeks.

[poldrack]

Rob - many thanks for your leadership on this! With my Steering Committee hat on, I think that one important issue that will need to be clarified for us is the rationale for BIDS in this domain given the existence of NWB, and how the two standards will relate to one another. We have always had a strong motivation to avoid duplicating standards so we would like to be very clear on the respective use cases.