PhysioNet News

15 December 2004	New in PhysioToolkit is puka, software that detects respiratory phase in strain gauge belt recordings, and that works together with other PhysioToolkit and open-source software to analyze respiratory and cardiac rhythms and their relationships. puka was contributed by its author, Joset Etzel of Iowa State University.
13 December 2004	Users of some recent Linux kernels (including those supplied with Fedora Core 2 and 3) have been unable to use certain features of WAVE, because these kernels are not completely compatible with the XView libraries needed by WAVE. New XView packages are now available for use with these recent kernels; they restore access to all of the features of WAVE; see this note for details.
31 October 2004	Read about the winners of the PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2004 here! This year's challenge invited participants to develop methods for predicting if (or when) an episode of atrial fibrillation will self-terminate. The final results have been posted, together with abstracts of the participants' papers, the winning software entries, and additional information about the challenge.
29 October 2004	Measurements of postural sway in healthy elderly and young volunteers, with and without subsensory stimulation of the soles of the feet to improve balance control, are available in a new database, Noise Enhancement of Sensorimotor Function.
27 October 2004	Software for multifractal analysis of time series has been contributed to PhysioToolkit by its author, Yossi Ashkenazy, and is now available here.
26 October 2004	IBS is a novel linguistic analysis method that has been successfully applied to studies of inter-beat interval time series, the origin of the SARS coronavirus, and the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. Software and an IBS tutorial are available here.
25 September 2004	New in PhysioBank is the PTB Diagnostic ECG Database, a collection of 549 high-resolution 15-lead ECGs (12 standard leads together with Frank XYZ leads), including clinical summaries for each record. From one to five ECG records are available for each of the 294 subjects, who include healthy subjects as well as patients with a variety of heart diseases.
17 September 2004	Software for evaluating ST analyzers has been contributed to PhysioToolkit by its authors, Franc Jager and Aleš Smrdel of the Laboratory of Biomedical Computer Systems and Imaging at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia).
4 August 2004	New in PhysioToolkit is software for multiscale entropy (MSE) analysis. This approach is useful for study of time series that have correlations at multiple scales. A new tutorial illustrating the application of the MSE method to analysis of interbeat (RR) interval time series accompanies the software.
2 July 2004	The CAST RR Interval Sub-Study Database has been contributed to PhysioBank. The database contains a set of beat annotation files (about 24 hours each) from 809 subjects enrolled in the Cardiac ArrhythmiaSuppression Trial (CAST), a landmark NHLBI-sponsored study. For 734 subjects, separate baseline (pre-treatment) and on-therapy records are available; the database consists of 1543 records in all, including roughly 150 million RR interval measurements. PhysioNet has inaugurated the Sudden Cardiac Death Holter Database. This is a collection of long-term ECG recordings of patients who experienced sudden cardiac death during the recordings. Half-hour excerpts of these recordings have been (and remain) available as the MIT-BIH Malignant Ventricular Ectopy Database. The new database includes a set of unaudited beat annotation files and an incomplete set of audited annotation files. Interested researchers are invited to contribute additional recordings and to join in the effort to complete a thorough and rigorously reviewed set of reference-quality annotation files for these unique recordings.
4 May 2004	Sorry for the interruption! The main PhysioNet server was off-line for about 45 minutes on 3 May during a power outage that affected a large portion of the city of Cambridge, including the MIT campus. Our backup power kept the server available for the first 25 minutes of the outage, which was the first to cause an interruption since PhysioNet was inaugurated almost 5 years ago. If you ever find that you can't reach PhysioNet, use Google to search for "physionet mirrors".
1 May 2004	PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2004 update: Twenty particpants submitted initial results for scoring before the first deadline passed. If your initial results were received before the first deadline, any results you submit before the final deadline of 14 September can be used to improve your standing. If you missed the first deadline, you may still submit results for unofficial scores.
11 April 2004	The latest in our annual series of challenges has been underway for several months. This year's challenge asks if it is possible to predict if (or when) an episode of atrial fibrillation will end spontaneously. Visit the Challenge 2004 home page to learn more. The autoscorer is now available to challenge participants. Submit your entry using the autoscorer and receive your score by return email within a few minutes. Top scores are also available and are continously updated by the autoscorer.

9 December 2003	The Long-Term ST Database has been updated with the addition of detailed clinical notes and ST deviation trend plots for all 86 records of the database.
6 December 2003	A beta release of the WFDB_tools package is now available for testing. This package allows Matlab R13 users to use the WFDB library to read and write digitized signals and annotations such as those available from PhysioBank. The WFDB_tools functions are wrappers for the WFDB library, so that Matlab users can access the full range of capabilities offered by current and future versions of the WFDB library, including transparent access to data in a large and growing number of formats, whether stored locally or on remote web servers. The package was written and contributed by Jonas Carlson. It has been tested successfully under GNU/Linux and MS-Windows, and it should be portable to MacOS X and other platforms supported by Matlab R13.
3 December 2003	Patrick McSharry and Gari Clifford have contributed ECGSYN, software for generating a realistic ECG signal with a wide variety of user-settable parameters. The package includes C, Java, and Matlab/Octave implementations, together with a paper describing the model.
23 October 2003	The NHLBI-sponsored multi-center Sleep Heart Health Study has contributed the first of a planned set of 1000 overnight polysomnograms to PhysioBank. The study has investigated the relationship between sleep disordered breathing and cardiovascular disease since 1995. The data include EEG, EOG, EMG, ECG, nasal airflow and respiratory effort signals, SaO2 and heart rate measurements, and annotated sleep stages, respiratory events, EEG arousals, and more.
17 October 2003	Version 10.3.11 of the WFDB software package incorporates many improvements over previous versions; a summary of recent changes is available here. Sources, GNU/Linux and MS-Windows binaries, and revised manuals are now available.
8 October 2003	The PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2004 is underway! The topic is spontaneous termination of atrial fibrillation. The challenge data set is available now; further details about the challenge will be posted shortly.
14 July 2003	The master PhysioNet server has been replaced by a new server with greater capacity and speed. Please report any problems you encounter by clicking on the comments link at the bottom of most pages (or to webmaster@physionet.org). Among the new features of this server are significantly improved Advanced Search and Chart-O-Matic facilities, and the complete MGH/MF Waveform Database.
6 June 2003	A two-lead ECG recording that was selected for inclusion in the AHA Database for Evaluation of Ventricular Arrhythmia Detectors, but eventually excluded, is now available here.
3 May 2003	Participants in the PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2003 have an extra week to submit abstracts describing their work, since the conference has extended the abstract deadline to Thursday, 8 May.
16 April 2003	Robert Tratnig and Klaus Rheinberger have contributed a Matlab viewer that reads and displays many PhysioBank records, the latest in a collection of software for Matlab and Octave contributed by PhysioNet users. An effort is now underway to create a set of Matlab wrappers for the WFDB library. Such wrappers would allow Matlab applications to make use of the full range of capabilities offered by the WFDB library, including direct access to records stored on PhysioNet and other web servers in addition to local disk files, support for a wide and growing variety of data formats using a uniform API, resampling on-the-fly, and much more. If you are interested in contributing to this project, whether as a developer, a tester, or a documentation writer, please write and let us know how you would like to participate.
14 April 2003	The creators of the Long-Term ST Database have contributed a paper describing the database (available as HTML or PDF).
14 March 2003	Several of the participants in the first PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge, together with the organizers, have published a joint paper that compares the methods used in the challenge and investigates how to combine several of the most successful strategies for detecting and quantifying sleep apnea based on the ECG. This paper appeared last year in Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing, and it can now be read on-line [external link, PDF].
9 March 2003	PhysioNet is made possible by the generous contributions of a worldwide community of researchers. We are pleased to inaugurate the PhysioNet Contributors Page, a who's who of those who have made this resource what it is.
8 March 2003	A heartprint is a novel way of visualizing the dynamics of ventricular ectopy. Software for creating heartprints from beat annotation files or RR interval lists has been contributed to PhysioToolkit.
7 March 2003	A pair of papers discussing the effects of trends and nonstationarities on detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), together with the surrogate data on which these studies were based, have been contributed to PhysioBank.
6 March 2003	The fourth annual PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge has begun. Is it possible to tell the difference between transient ST changes in the ECG that are due to myocardial ischemia, and those that are not? We invite you to participate in this challenge, making use of the recently completed Long-Term ST Database to study this provocative question.
5 March 2003	A new tutorial, RR Intervals, Heart Rate, and HRV, provides a brief overview of how to obtain inter-beat (RR) interval and heart rate time series, and of some basic methods for characterizing heart rate variability, using freely available PhysioToolkit software.
4 March 2003	The Intracardiac Atrial Fibrillation Database is a new collection of high-resolution recordings from eight subjects in atrial fibrillation or flutter. Each recording includes three surface ECG signals and five intracardiac signals, all simultaneously recorded. These are the first freely available recordings of their type.
3 March 2003	Software for measuring pNNx, a family of time-domain heart rate variability statistics of which the widely-used pNN50 is a member, has been contributed to PhysioToolkit. The study that introduced pNNx made use of several PhysioBank databases as well as additional data that have also been contributed to PhysioBank, including the Congestive Heart Failure RR Interval Database, the Normal Sinus Rhythm RR Interval Database, and the remainder of the Fantasia Database (see the news item for 2 March below). The Congestive Heart Failure RR Interval Database includes beat annotations (about 24 hours each, no ECGs) for 29 subjects with congestive heart failure (NYHA classes 1, 2, and 3). The Normal Sinus Rhythm RR Interval Database also includes 24-hour beat annotation files for 54 subjects in normal sinus rhythm.
2 March 2003	A subset of data from the Fantasia Database has been available here for several years; the remainder of the database is now available. It consists of ECG and respiration recordings, with beat annotations, from 20 young and 20 elderly subjects, all rigorously screened as healthy, in sinus rhythm during a resting state (two hours each). Half of the recordings also include (uncalibrated) continuous noninvasive blood pressure signals.
28 February 2003	The creators of the Long-Term ST Database have contributed half of it (43 of 86 complete records) to PhysioNet. Each record is 21 to 24 hours long, and contains 2 or 3 ECG signals, annotated beat-by-beat and with respect to ST episodes, rhythm changes, and signal quality changes; each record also includes ST level time series based on 16-second averages centered on each beat.
25 February 2003	Version 10.3.2 of the WFDB Software Package has just been released, with new several new applications and numerous updates; see the release notes for details.
3 January 2003	A standard set of test waveforms, as specified by ANSI/AAMI EC13 (the American National Standard for cardiac monitors, heart rate meters, and alarms), is now available in PhysioBank.

12 December 2002	The Sleep-EDF Database is a collection of sleep recordings from healthy subjects contributed to PhysioBank by Bob Kemp. These recordings are presented in European Data Format (EDF), a standard for archiving and exchanging polysomnographic recordings. It's easy to read and write EDF files using the format converters available in PhysioToolkit. A gentle introduction to much of the software available on this site is offered by Applying PhysioNet tools to manage neurophysiological signals, a tutorial with data and hands-on exercises contributed by Jesus Olivan Palacios.
5 December 2002	An arterial blood pressure (ABP) pulse detector for continous ABP signals has been added to version 10.3.1 of the WFDB Software Package, which has just been posted. Read about other new features here.
26 November 2002	Version 10.3.0 of the WFDB Software Package has just been released, with many new features. Highlights include a port to MacOS/X; a new WFDB library interface permitting random access to digitized signals; a new QRS detector; a new application for signal averaging; up-to-date binaries for GNU/Linux, MS-Windows (including, for the first time, a WFDB DLL), and Solaris; updated manuals; and more.
17 November 2002	Version 2.2 of plt adds support for MacOS/X and an updated manual.
13 November 2002	A new and improved version of Floyd Harriott's ECG waveform generator has been posted.
8 November 2002	An application for exporting PhysioBank records in EDF (European Data Format) is now available; find it here [link updated 25 November 2002]. The complementary application for converting EDF recordings into PhysioBank format has been available as part of the WFDB Software Package for several years.
7 November 2002	Version 2.1 of plt, PhysioToolkit's scriptable plotting utility, is now available for GNU/Linux, MS-Windows, and in source form for other platforms.
31 October 2002	New XView packages have been posted for Red Hat GNU/Linux 7.x and 8.x. XView provides the GUI elements of WAVE and SEMIA; the new packages incorporate many bug fixes and provide a more stable GUI for WAVE and SEMIA under GNU/Linux.
30 October 2002	Final versions of five complete (24-hour) records from the Long-Term ST Database are now available, together with SEMIA, a tool for viewing the detailed trend data, annotations, and ECG signals from these records. More records from this database will be available shortly.
26 October 2002	New editions of the WFDB Software Package's manuals have been posted, with many revisions, additions, corrections, and cross-references. All are available in HTML for on-line reference as well as in PDF and PostScript versions for download and printing.
26 September 2002	The RR interval time series models that were entered into event 1 of the PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2002 are now available for study. Each of the ten models is implemented as a self-contained C program that can generate a synthetic RR interval time series of at least 24 hours' duration.
8 August 2002	Using the AHA Database with PhysioToolkit is easier than ever with the new ahaconvert script (batch file) for importing data from AHA CD-ROMs.
24 June 2002	Most PhysioToolkit software uses the WFDB library to read and write PhysioBank-format files; the library is also available for use in your own programs. Beginning with version 10.2.6, applications that use the WFDB library can choose any convenient sampling frequency, and the library will transparently resample input signals at that frequency.
10 June 2002	The Massachusetts General Hospital/Marquette Foundation (MGH/MF) Waveform Database is a collection of 250 recordings of hemodynamic and electrocardiographic waveforms of patients in critical care units. Typical recordings include three ECG signals, ABP, PAP, CVP, respiratory impedance, and airway CO2 waveforms. The first 25 recordings of the MGH/MF Waveform database are now available here. Update: the entire database is now available.
29 May 2002	A brief overview of multifractal time series has been posted in the Tutorials section of PhysioNet.
9 May 2002	The top scores for the PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2002 have now been posted. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to all who participated!
24 April 2002	Event 2 of the PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2002 has now begun. You are invited to match wits with participants in event 1, who have created a variety of realistic models of interbeat (RR) interval time series. Can you spot the simulations hidden among the real data in the challenge dataset?
18 April 2002	An algorithm for assessing physical activity from a heart rate time series, and a paper describing its development and evaluation, are now available in PhysioToolkit.
10 March 2002	The WFDB Software Package is one of the centerpieces of PhysioToolkit, and is revised frequently. Version 10.2.5 has just been posted, together with an updated set of tutorials and reference manuals. The 10.2 series, which has been tested extensively since mid-October, represents a significant advance over previous versions (see this list of changes and new features); please try it out!
14 February 2002	We are pleased to announce the latest in our annual series of PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenges. The topic for this challenge is RR interval time series modeling. Can you create a model that produces realistic short-term and long-term variations in interbeat intervals? Can you distinguish between synthetic and real RR interval time series? Take the challenge!
7 February 2002	Software for locating waveform boundaries in the ECG (i.e., the beginnings, peaks, and ends of P, QRS, and T waves) has been contributed to PhysioNet. The software can be used to analyze either annotated or unannotated recordings (it includes an implementation of the Pan-Tompkins QRS detection algorithm).
5 February 2002	A new tutorial, Morphology Representation Using Principal Components, presents practical methods and sample code for deriving noise-tolerant measurements of waveform shape, using the QRS complex of the ECG as an example.
4 February 2002	Software for automated detection of obstructive sleep apnea from the ECG has been contributed to PhysioToolkit. The apdet software package was written as an entry in the Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2000.

15 December 2001	PhysioNet's Challenges are the subject of a feature article in New Scientist ("Off-Beat", 15 December 2001, pp. 33-35). The article may be read here (registration required).
26 November 2001	The latest addition to PhysioNet's growing collection of tutorials is Exploring Patterns in Nature, a set of interactive tutorials focussing on emergent phenomena (random behavior at the smallest scales leading to patterns at larger scales). Subjects include fractal dimension, measuring randomness, physical and chemical branching structures, biological branching patterns, diffusion, percolation, and motion on a fractal.
11 November 2001	New software for detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) has been posted, together with notes on its use.
26 September 2001	Final scores have been posted for the Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2001. Thanks to all who participated!
19 September 2001	RCVSIM is an open-source cardiovascular simulator for research, designed for compatibility with PhysioBank data formats and PhysioToolkit analysis software. The sources are extensively commented to facilitate modifications and extensions to suit the needs of specific research projects, and a comprehensive user's guide is available.
16 August 2001	A new collection of Long-term Recordings of Gait Dynamics: Unconstrained and Metronomic Walking has been added to PhysioBank. Sixty hours of stride interval time series from ten healthy volunteers exhibit long-range correlations in unconstrained walking and anti-correlations during metronomic walking.
28 July 2001	GTKWave is a reimplementation of the original WAVE application for viewing, analyzing, and annotating PhysioBank recordings, with a modern GUI that is portable between Unix and MS-Windows. A beta version of GTKWave is now available, including sources, Linux binaries, and MS-Windows binaries. Please try it out!
1 March 2001	Can paroxysmal atrial fibrillation be predicted? PhysioNet and Computers in Cardiology 2001 challenge you to develop and evaluate a method for doing so, in CinC Challenge 2001, the second in an annual series of open contests aimed at catalyzing research, friendly competition, and wide-ranging collaboration around this clinically important problem. Prizes will be awarded to the most successful participants. Update (21 September): The challenge has ended, and no additional entries will be accepted.. You may still obtain unofficial scores if you wish to try the challenge; look here for further information.
11 January 2001	ISI (Institute of Scientific Information, publishers of the Current Contents index of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, books, and proceedings) has selected PhysioNet for inclusion in Current Web Contents, a newly established index of evaluated scholarly web sites.

21 December 2000	A database of Gait Dynamics in Neuro-Degenerative Disease has been added to PhysioBank. This database includes recordings of gait from subjects with Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and healthy controls.
29 November 2000	Five complete (21 to 24 hour) records from the Long-Term ST Database have been contributed to PhysioBank, together with a pair of papers describing the database [1, 2]. This six-year multinational project is nearing completion. These are the first recordings to be made available from this database.
4 November 2000	Previously unreleased signal files for the MIT-BIH Atrial Fibrillation Database have been added to PhysioBank.
14 October 2000	The BIDMC Congestive Heart Failure Database has been added to PhysioBank. This database includes fifteen 20-hour recordings of patients with severe heart failure (NYHA class 3-4).
7 October 2000	The Chart-o-matic is now available for viewing PhysioBank data within any web browser capable of rendering PNG images (such as those on this page). Please try it out!
30 September 2000	Over half of the European ST-T Database is now freely accessible in PhysioBank, thanks to the support of the European Society of Cardiology and the creators of the database.
22 September 2000	Final scores for Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2000 are now posted. Thanks to all who participated in this outstandingly successful event!
4 August 2000	PhysioNet is the subject of a feature article published by the daily science news service UniSci today. The article highlights the highly successful Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2000, which has stimulated efforts by researchers worldwide to develop methods for detecting and quantifying sleep apnea using the ECG only, and to evaluate these methods using a large database available from PhysioBank.
11 July 2000 Links2Go Biophysics	PhysioNet has been selected as one of 23 "Key Resources" on the web in biophysics.
28 June 2000	Our article titled PhysioBank, PhysioToolkit, and PhysioNet: Components of a New Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals has just been published in Circulation. By special arrangement this article can be read on Circulation's web site without restrictions. If you make use of data or software from PhysioNet, please cite this article.
23 June 2000	The master PhysioNet web server at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts has been visited from over 10,000 different locations in about 70 countries around the world during its first 10 months of operation. During that period it has delivered more than 100 gigabytes of data (not including data transmitted to or by the PhysioNet mirrors).
11 June 2000	Precompiled binaries (ready-to-run versions) of the WFDB Software Package for 32-bit MS-Windows (95/98/NT/2000) and Solaris now include NETFILES support (built-in HTTP and FTP client support, making it possible to view and analyze PhysioBank recordings without downloading them to local storage, and without a web browser). This feature has been available under Linux since last September. Precompiled binaries without NETFILES support are now available for HP-UX as well.
26 April 2000	The deadline for entries in the Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2000 has been extended. (The deadline for submitting abstracts for the conference has not changed, however.) The WFDB Software Package is now available in RPM form for easy installation under Linux.
12 April 2000	Precompiled binaries (executables) of the WFDB Software Package for 32-bit MS-Windows (95/98/NT/2000) have been added to those previously available for Linux, MS-DOS and 16-bit MS-Windows, Solaris, and SunOS. Entrants in the Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2000 can now submit their results for scoring.
9 April 2000	Binary annotation and signal files from PhysioBank can now be converted to text format from your web browser. The conversions are performed using rdann and rdsamp , two utilities from the WFDB software package that can also be downloaded and run on your own computer for greater flexibility. A list of frequently asked questions (with answers) is now available.
5 April 2000	Science's NetWatch features PhysioNet in its issue of 31 March 2000. (A subscription or free registration is required to visit this site.)
19 March 2000	Software for deriving a respiration signal from one or two ECG signals using the EDR technique, the original paper that describes this technique, and a second paper describing applications of the EDR, are now available in PhysioToolkit.
17 March 2000	PhysioNet has been chosen as HMS Beagle's "Web Pick of the Day".
15 March 2000	Periodic measurements of physiologic variables (such as heart rate, blood pressure, respiration rate, and oxygen saturation) are now available for all 121 records of the MIMIC Database. These data amount to nearly 200 patient-days of continuous recordings from over 90 ICU patients.
29 February 2000	PhysioToolkit is the new name for our library of open-source software, formerly known as PhysioTools.
10 February 2000	Can sleep apnea be detected using the ECG only? PhysioNet and Computers in Cardiology 2000 challenge you to develop and evaluate a method for doing so, in CinC Challenge 2000, an open contest aimed at catalyzing research, friendly competition, and wide-ranging collaboration around this clinically important problem. Prizes will be awarded to the most successful participants.
20 January 2000	See the additions to the Tutorials and Publications sections of PhysioNet.

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Updated Tuesday, 26-Feb-2008 15:04:05 EST