2001 News

PhysioNet's Challenges are the subject of a feature article in New Scientist ("Off-Beat", 15 December 2001, pp. 33-35). 

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.

New software for detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) has been posted, together with notes on its use.

Final scores have been posted for the Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2001. Thanks to all who participated!

RCVSIM is an open-source cardiovascular simulator for research, designed for compatibility with PhysioNet data formats and 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.

A new collection of Long-term Recordings of Gait Dynamics: Unconstrained and Metronomic Walking has been added to PhysioNet. Sixty hours of stride interval time series from ten healthy volunteers exhibit long-range correlations in unconstrained walking and anti-correlations during metronomic walking.

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!

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.

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.