What changed in each release.

The largest release since 1.0. A whole modality arrives, and the form that asks you for metadata stopped being written by hand and started being built from the standard itself.

New

• PET support. Positron emission tomography is now a first-class modality. PET studies scan, convert and validate alongside everything else, from either of the two formats scanners produce: DICOM, and the ECAT files that Siemens HRRT and older CTI systems write.
  • Hybrid studies convert in one pass. On a PET/MR study the MR half is ordinary anatomical and functional data, and BIDS Manager converts it in the same run. On a PET/CT study the CT half is set aside with a note explaining why: BIDS has no place for CT in a raw dataset yet.
  • The metadata a scanner cannot know. A PET sidecar needs around forty fields, and the scanner header holds about half of them. It records how the image was reconstructed, but not how much tracer was injected, in what form, or when. Those now have a home: a Tracer, Radiochemistry, Acquisition and Reconstruction block in Dataset metadata, with per-scan overrides in the properties panel, and the same inherit-from-the-dataset behaviour the EEG and MEG fields already have.
  • The scan reads what it can and proposes it. Tracer, radionuclide, injected dose and reconstruction settings are read out of the source and offered as suggestions beside the fields they inform. They are never filled in silently, because a vendor writes these as free text and a wrong tracer is worse than a blank one.
  • Bring your dose table. If the radiochemistry already exists as a spreadsheet, point bidsmgr-convert --pet-spreadsheet at it. Column names are matched loosely, so Injected Dose and injected_radioactivity both work.
• The metadata form is built from the standard, not written by hand. Dataset metadata used to ask a fixed set of questions that somebody had typed out, which meant it could ask for a field a datatype does not accept, and could not ask for one nobody had thought of. It is now generated from the BIDS schema.
  • A recording can state any field its file may carry. If the standard declares a field for that datatype and suffix, the form offers it, at its real requirement level, with the standard's own description on hover.
  • What the conversion already answers is folded away. The scan runs the converter once, quietly, and reads what came out, so the form can separate the fields that will be filled for you from the ones only you can answer. The settled block is still editable: correcting a value there is how you tell the tool its header was wrong.
  • The BIDS version you choose is honoured everywhere. Not only in validation. It decides which fields the form asks for, which entities a filename may carry, and what is written into dataset_description.json.
  • Answers take the shape the standard declares. A field typed as a number reaches the sidecar as a number and an array of numbers as an array of numbers, whether you typed it into the form or into a cell in the table.
• Time-activity curves in the viewer. Open a dynamic PET image and the time-series graph now plots against real seconds rather than frame number. PET frames get longer as the tracer decays, so a ten-second frame and a five-minute frame sit side by side in one scan; plotting them as equal steps flattens the early part of the curve, which is exactly where the interesting kinetics are.
• Blood data becomes part of the dataset. A PMOD blood file can be attached to the PET run it belongs to and is written out as the _blood.tsv and _blood.json pair the standard defines. The three curves BIDS recognises, whole blood, plasma and parent fraction, are linked separately, and marking each as manually drawn or taken by an autosampler decides the entity in the filename rather than only the description inside it.
• pet2bids is now part of the installation. It reads the ECAT7 headers and the PMOD blood curves, which took an ECAT sidecar from five fields to twenty-three, with units and a reference time. Two behaviours were worked around on the way: a metadata template shared between files, which drifted the frame timing through a batch, and a data dictionary describing columns that were not present in the output.
• Duplicate BIDS names are caught before conversion. Every row's destination filename is worked out in advance. Genuine repeats are given a run number where the standard allows one; where it does not, both names are shown in red and the conversion refuses to start rather than write one recording over another. Fixing either row clears the warning on both.
• Every validation finding cites its rule. The schema rule a requirement comes from is shown beneath the message, in the validation pane, in the file dialog and in the HTML report, so a finding can be checked against the standard instead of taken on trust.
• Files in folders that are not datatypes are reported. A perfectly named file inside anatt/, or in a hand-made raw/ folder, passes most checks and is invisible to every BIDS tool, because tools read inside the datatype folders. This is now an error naming the folder and listing the ones that would be valid.
• PET sanity checks. The Editor now warns when the numbers in a PET sidecar disagree with each other: a dose that looks like it was entered in the wrong unit, a specific activity that does not follow from the dose and mass, frames that run backwards, a timing offset with no reference time to measure it from. These are warnings, never errors.

Fixed

• Scans no longer skip DICOM files with dots in their names. Philips exports name each file after its internal identifier, and GE Signa uses a .img ending. Both are ordinary DICOM, and both were being passed over, whatever the modality. If a past scan of a Philips or GE dataset came back emptier than expected, it is worth rescanning.
• Patient details are stripped from PET sidecars. Name, identifier, birth date and referring physician are removed on conversion. The study and series identifiers stay, so an image can still be traced back to the series it came from.
• Numbers typed into the metadata form stay numbers. A list of numbers, frame times or reconstruction parameters, was being stored as a list of text. Worse, opening the form and saving it rewrote values the conversion had already got right, so filling in the metadata could add errors to a sidecar that had been correct. Both are fixed, and a template already saved that way is repaired the next time it is applied: nothing has to be typed in again.
• A blood table's sidecar is named for the sampling it belongs to. BIDS requires the recording entity on both the table and its sidecar. It was being written on the table only, which left a valid table beside a sidecar that no tool could match to it.
• Acquisition times with a missing leading zero are repaired. A converter can write 11:22:1.995, which is not a time any validator will accept, and it was copied on into scans.tsv, so one slip was reported twice.
• One project's metadata stays inside that project. Answers given for one dataset no longer follow you into the next.
• Windows: the settled metadata block is filled in again. On Windows, "Already answered by the conversion" came up empty for every MRI kind, while the same dataset filled it on macOS and Linux. The values were never missing from the data. The pass that measures them works inside a folder whose path could run past the length Windows allows, and the converter does not fail gracefully there: it stops without a message, and a measurement nobody could take looked the same as a measurement there was nothing to take. Those paths are now short and of fixed length. If that block came up empty for you, rescanning fills it.
• Windows: the converter is found however you started the application. The dcm2niix that ships with the Python package carries a different name on Windows, and BIDS Manager looked only for the other one. Started from an activated environment a fallback found it anyway; started from a desktop shortcut or a bundled interpreter it did not, and both the classifier that proposes BIDS names and the pass that measures metadata were skipped without saying so.
• A series whose output does not name itself is no longer dropped. On some acquisitions, a Siemens XA30 localiser among them, the converter writes an identifier into the sidecar that does not match the one the series carries. Those outputs belonged to no row and their measurements were lost. Each is now attributed to the series it was actually converted from.
• A dropdown inside a folded section is wide enough to read. A menu field sized itself while it was still hidden, so a value the conversion had answered could appear as a stub too narrow to show its own text.
• A path too long for Windows now says so. The one failure that produced no message at all now reports the limit and the length of the path that exceeded it, so the next time it happens it is a message rather than a silence.

Changed

• The inventory gained five read-only columns carrying the PET details read from the source. They are appended, so every existing column keeps its position. In the interface those values are offered inside the fields they inform rather than shown as columns.
• pet2bids is a new dependency, installed with the application. Nothing to do on your side.
• A dataset's name now means one thing. It is the folder name, stated once when the project is created, and the interface says what a rename would affect rather than silently keeping two answers.