2013 News

Two upcoming events at MIT will be of interest to users of the MIMIC II Databases. The first is the Critical Data Marathon, a weekend event (3-5 January 2014) run in partnership with Sana Mobile and H@cking Medicine. The Critical Data Marathon will bring together teams of engineers and clinicians to develop tools and crowd-source knowledge and insight in clinical data, with a hands-on data mining workshop using the MIMIC II Clinical Database. The second event is a conference, Critical Data, on 7 January 2014, which aims to bring together clinicians, clinical researchers, and data scientists to discusss the opportunities and challenges surrounding meaningful reuse of clinical data. Remote participation is possible for those unable to attend these events at MIT.

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.

A greatly expanded version of the Sleep-EDF Database, of which a small subset was previously contributed in 2002, is now available in PhysioNet. The database now includes 61 full-night polysomnograms of healthy subjects and of subjects with mild difficulty falling asleep, with accompanying expert annotations of sleep stages.

Over 60 teams of participants from around the world participated in the PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2013 on the subject of noninvasive fetal ECG. The final scores of the top-ranking teams have been posted. Also available are the slides presented by the 28 participants who discussed their work during sessions dedicated to the Challenge at Computing in Cardiology 2013 in Zaragoza, Spain.

Top scores have been posted in the Challenge Overview. Participants' CinC 2013 papers about the Challenge and the top open-source entries have also been posted.

The WFDB Toolbox for MATLAB is a collection of MATLAB functions for reading, writing, and manipulating (processing) PhysioNet data, implemented as system calls to WFDB Software Package applications through Java and MATLAB wrappers. A new implementation of the toolbox provides faster operation and a significantly expanded set of functions.

Participants in the PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2013 may submit Phase 2 entries from now until noon GMT on 25 August. An autoscorer returns instant results for events 4 and 5. Following the deadline, final scores for all entries will be available, and participants will have a week to submit a single Phase 3 entry.

PhysioNet is one of four NIH-supported initiatives highlighted in a recent White House blog entry about accelerating the pace of discovery through the use of Big Data. (The others are the Human Connectome Project, the BRAIN Initiative, and the Cancer Genome Atlas.)

The open test set B (100 one-minute noninvasive fetal ECG recordings) for Challenge 2013 is now available, together with a supplement of 50 additional recordings in training set A.

This year's challenge invites participants to develop software capable of detecting fetal QRS complexes in multichannel noninvasive ECG recordings, making accurate estimates of fetal heart rate, RR intervals, and QT intervals. An annotated training set of 25 one-minute recordings is available now; a sample entry, software for scoring, and test recordings will be available shortly.