2008 News

TWAnalyser is open-source software for detecting and measuring T-wave alternans in the ECG, originally developed for the recently-concluded PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2008. Detailed notes on installing and using TWAnalyser are now available.

The journal Chaos will publish a special issue containing discussion of the question "Is the normal heart rate chaotic?" in 2009. To provide a common focus for investigation of this question, a collection of fifteen 20-24 hour RR interval time series derived from three PhysioBank ECG databases is now available for study.

The Long Term AF Database, a collection of 84 two-lead 24-hour ECG recording of subjects with paroxysmal and sustained atrial fibrillation, is now available.

If you have any questions or comments regarding this challenge, please post it directly in our Community Discussion Forum. This will increase transparency (benefiting all the competitors) and ensure that all the challenge organizers see your question.

Congratulations to the winners of the PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2008 on the subject of T-wave alternans. Final results are now available: scores, reference rankings of the Challenge 2008 data set, and the open source software contributed by participants in the open source division of the Challenge.

A collection of multiparameter recordings created to study stress recognition in automobile drivers has been contributed to PhysioNet. The database contains recordings from healthy volunteers taken while they were driving on a prescribed route including city streets and highways in and around Boston. Signals recorded include ECG, EMG, GSR, and respiration.

The St. Petersburg Institute of Cardiological Technics 12-lead Arrhythmia Database has been contributed to PhysioNet by its creators. It consists of 75 half-hour recordings extracted from 32 Holter records from patients undergoing tests for coronary artery disease, with reference annotation files containing over 175,000 beat annotations in all.

The PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2008 is underway. The topic of this, the ninth open challenge in our annual series, is detection and quantification of T-wave alternans.

A newly posted tutorial describes How to obtain PhysioBank data in text form.

PhysioBank now includes a large database of Gait in Parkinson's Disease, a collection of multichannel recordings from force sensors beneath the feet of 93 patients with Parkinson's Disease, and 73 healthy controls, collected from three studies.