Storing Subject metadata / Demographic information in the database

[Edouard2laire]

Cross-posting an old issue from Nirstorm: Nirstorm/nirstorm#48

The main idea would to be able to store metadata about the subjects in the database, notably their demographic information (age, sex, ...) and group assignation (healthy control, patient...).

Current solution:

Currently, there is no real solution for that, which leads to the misuse of other Brainstorm functionalities. Users will notably use the comment field, or what I mostly have seen is the subject name. For example, it's very common to get patient data from MD with the subject name along the lines of PAXXX_25_noEEG_MEGOK_SEEG-_OK-fusion

Proposed solution:

Attach an additional structure (table?) to each protocol containing the subject's information.

**Other considerations: **

• BIDS loading / export : We can load / save the information from the participants.tsv file: https://bids-specification.readthedocs.io/en/stable/modality-agnostic-files.html#participants-file

• Allow to filter/select file based on the table (ie; select all subjects from the HC group or all subjects under 25yo, ...)

** Other post about the issue: **

• https://neuroimage.usc.edu/forums/t/scripting-group-assignment-in-large-database/49327

If this is ok, then we can discuss on how to implement it; and i am ok to help with the implementation:)