BIDSonym: a BIDS App for the pseudo-anonymization of neuroimaging datasets

Abstract

In concordance with the BIDS-App template (Gorgolewski et al., 2017), BIDSonym operates as a command line tool written in Python (Rossum, 1995) and is intended to run in its containerized version (either using Docker (https://www.docker.com) or Singularity (https://sylabs.io), providing all necessary software dependencies. However, it is also available as a Python package via PyPI (https://pypi.org) to facilitate reuse in a development environment. BIDSonym expects BIDS datasets (Gorgolewski et al., 2016) and provides three core functionalities as depicted in Figure 1: defacing of structural (i.e., T1and T2-weighted) images, adaptation of potentially sensitive metadata information, and evaluation of (pseudo-) anonymization results.