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Introduction


Development of the Long Term ST Database (LTST DB) started in January 1995 under the joint project between the FCIS (Ljubljana) and MIT (Boston) sponsored by the U.S.-Slovenian Science and Technology Joint Fund Secretariat which yielded in a database of eleven 24-hour annotated ambulatory records. In 1997, Medtronic, Inc. agreed to sponsor further development of the database. At that time, the research groups from ICP (Pisa), BIDMC (Boston) and UMC (Ljubljana) joined to the project. In 1999, Zymed, Inc. agreed to additionaly sponsor the project in order to add a set of three lead ambulatory records. Goals of the LTST DB are to represent the wide variety of ``real-world'' data with many examples of significant non-ischemic ST events to gain development of improved algorithms to differentiate ischemic ST episodes from non-ischemic ST events, to include variety of temporal patterns in ST level on long run to enable researchers to study lengthly physiologic mechanisms and dynamics of ischemia, to include variety of rhythm abnormalities to enable studies on their correlations with ischemic ST episodes, and to permit more reliable prediction of clinical performance from the first-order performance statistics due to long duration records. In our previous report, we explained aspects and reasons for development of the LTST DB, and reported current status of protocols and annotating of transient ST events [1]. As the pool of collected and annotated records has grown, the characteristics of transient ST events became more clear. It was necessary to enhance definitions of transient ST events as well as annotation protocol to accurately cover all possible characteristics and origins of ST events. The aim of this paper is to report the final design and construction of the database. We present the selection criteria for records, improved annotation protocol with definitions of significant transient ST events, annotating procedure, improved tools to identify, classify and semiautomaticaly annotate ST events, and present the content of the records of the database.


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Next: The LTST database Up: The Long-Term ST Database: Previous: The Long-Term ST Database: