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[ENH] Add a PPMI-to-BIDS converter #1709

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@gianfrancortes

I would like to propose adding a BIDS converter for the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) dataset.

Clinica already supports conversion of several major public neuroimaging datasets (e.g., ADNI, AIBL, OASIS, UK Biobank), but PPMI does not appear to be currently supported. Given PPMI’s widespread use in Parkinson’s disease research and its longitudinal, multi-site imaging data, it seems like a natural addition to Clinica’s converter ecosystem.

There are existing open-source efforts for converting PPMI data to BIDS:

However, these projects appear to be no longer actively maintained and may not reflect the current PPMI download structure or modern BIDS tooling. They could still provide useful references for a Clinica implementation.

An initial converter could support:

  • subject and longitudinal session mapping;
  • T1-weighted MRI;
  • diffusion MRI, including .bval / .bvec handling;
  • BIDS sidecar and dataset-level metadata.

Support for additional modalities could be added incrementally.

I would be interested in contributing this implementation, particularly the MRI and diffusion MRI support. I am currently working with PPMI diffusion imaging data and would be happy to further investigate the current PPMI data organization, define an initial supported scope, and implement the converter following Clinica’s existing converter architecture.

Would the maintainers be open to adding PPMI as a supported dataset converter?

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