About PhysioNet
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PhysioNet offers free access via the web to large collections of
recorded physiologic signals and related open-source software. The
PhysioNet web site is a public service of
the PhysioNet Resource
funded by the National
Institutes of Health's NIBIB and NIGMS.
If this is your first visit, please try PhysioTour, a short self-guided tour that highlights the major features of PhysioNet. A brief introduction to PhysioNet, with attention to PhysioNet's significance to the NIH and its mission, is also available in HTML, ODP (OpenOffice Impress), PDF, and PPT formats. Support PhysioNet! [Read more] |
Visit the PhysioNet Bookstore for a selection of tutorial and reference books about this resource. [Link opens in another window.] |
Beginning in September 2007, primary support for PhysioNet comes from two institutes of the National Institutes of Health (NIH): the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). We are deeply grateful for the support of NIBIB and NIGMS, which makes PhysioNet's continued growth possible.
PhysioNet was established in 1999 as the outreach component of the Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals, a cooperative project initiated by researchers at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, Boston University, McGill University, and MIT, originally established under the auspices of the National Center for Research Resources of the NIH.
The PhysioNet Resource, intended to stimulate current research and new investigations in the study of complex biomedical and physiologic signals, has three closely interdependent components:
PhysioBank is a large and growing archive of well-characterized digital recordings of physiologic signals and related data for use by the biomedical research community. PhysioBank currently includes databases of multi-parameter cardiopulmonary, neural, and other biomedical signals from healthy subjects and patients with a variety of conditions with major public health implications, including sudden cardiac death, congestive heart failure, epilepsy, gait disorders, sleep apnea, and aging. These collections include data from a wide range of studies, as developed and contributed by members of the research community.
PhysioToolkit is a large and growing library of software for physiologic signal processing and analysis, detection of physiologically significant events using both classical techniques and novel methods based on statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics, interactive display and characterization of signals, creation of new databases, simulation of physiologic and other signals, quantitative evaluation and comparison of analysis methods, and analysis of nonequilibrium and nonstationary processes. A unifying theme of many of the research projects that contribute software to PhysioToolkit is the extraction of ``hidden'' information from biomedical signals, information that may have diagnostic or prognostic value in medicine, or explanatory or predictive power in basic research. All PhysioToolkit software is available in source form under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
PhysioNet is not only the name of the Resource, but also of its web site, physionet.org. The PhysioNet web site was established by the Resource as its mechanism for free and open dissemination and exchange of recorded biomedical signals and open-source software for analyzing them, by providing facilities for cooperative analysis of data and evaluation of proposed new algorithms. In addition to providing free electronic access to PhysioBank data and PhysioToolkit software, the PhysioNet web site offers service and training via on-line tutorials to assist users at entry and more advanced levels. The PhysioNet web site is a public service of the Resource.
All data included in PhysioBank, and all software included in PhysioToolkit, are carefully reviewed. We invite you to participate in the ongoing review process. By sharing common data sets, and software in source form, the research community benefits from access to materials that have been rigorously scrutinized by many investigators. We further invite researchers to contribute data and software for review and possible inclusion in PhysioBank and PhysioToolkit. Please review our guidelines for contributors before submitting material.
Links to a variety of other on-line resources likely to be of interest to PhysioNet visitors are listed here.
Current Research within this Resource
Methods for assessment of signal quality and detection of events in weakly correlated multiparameter data; false alarm reduction in the ICU; methods for multivariate trend analysis and forecasting, with applications in intensive care; cardiovascular system modeling (including adaptation to microgravity and orthostatic intolerance); novel signal processing techniques for automated or semi-automated patient diagnosis; web-enabled signal processing, with applications in research and telemedicine; data mining algorithms for efficient searching in very long time series; networked instrumentation for acquisition and remote viewing of real-time physiologic data (Gari Clifford, Roger Mark, George Moody).
Algorithms that quantify the transient and local properties of nonstationary physiologic signals and the cross-interactions among multiparameter signals; application of these techniques to detect changes that may precede the onset of catastrophic physiologic events, including epileptic seizures and sudden cardiac death; techniques for quantifying the dynamics of physiologic control; mathematical/physiological modeling of these control mechanisms; identification of new measures related to nonlinear dynamics and fractal scaling that have diagnostic/prognostic use in life-threatening cardiopulmonary pathologies (Madalena Costa, Leon Glass, Ary Goldberger, Jeff Hausdorff, Joe Mietus, CK Peng).
A list of recent publications by investigators affiliated with the Resource is available here. Also see the PhysioNet Contributors Page.
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Updated Tuesday, 05-Feb-2008 22:40:11 EST