2004 News

New in PhysioNet 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. <tt>puka</tt> was contributed by its author, Joset Etzel of Iowa State University.

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.

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.

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.

Software for multifractal analysis of time series has been contributed to PhysioNet by its author, Yossi Ashkenazy, and is now available here.

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.

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.

Software for evaluating ST analyzers has been contributed to PhysioNet by its authors, Franc Jager and Aleš Smrdel of the Laboratory of Biomedical Computer Systems and Imaging at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia).

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.

The CAST RR Interval Sub-Study Database has been contributed to PhysioNet. 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.

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".

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.

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.