EzBIDS: The open cloud service for automated, validated DICOM to BIDS conversion

Over the past several years there has been a concerted effort within the neuroimaging field to organize and standardize imaging data according to the specifications laid out in the Brain Imaging Dataset Structure standard (BIDS; Gorgolewski et al., 2016). Adhering to this standard is of great benefit for data sharing and replication of previous studies. Yet, as of today data BIDSification process is nontrivial and requires a considerable amount of time as well as advanced software skills. Currently, a few dozen open-source projects have developed code to allow convert DICOM to BIDS. However, all these projects require the use of a Linux terminal and programming; no tool currently exists targeting the broader community of potential BIDS standards users with a diverse background spanning from no to limited coding skills. To broaden the reach and adoption of the BIDS standard more mechanisms are necessary that can lower the barrier of entry to data standardization. We present a new cloud computing service that automatically maps DICOM files to the BIDS standard. The service is publicly available at brainlife.io/ezbids but can also be deployed on other resources.