PhysioNet
# PhysioNet: Brief Introduction PhysioNet, the moniker of the Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals, was established in 1999 under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as described further below. The PhysioNet Resource's original and ongoing missions were to conduct and catalyze for biomedical research and education, in part by offering free access to large collections of physiological and clinical data and related open-source software. In cooperation with the annual Computing in Cardiology conference, PhysioNet also hosts an annual series of challenges, focusing research on unsolved problems in clinical and basic science. Members of PhysioNet's team are actively involved in innovative work on analysis of physiologic signals, both from basic and translational perspectives. The PhysioNet platform is managed by members of the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology. The other core laboratory of the PhysioNet Resource is the Margret and H.A. Rey Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. # A Community Resource The PhysioNet resource has three closely interdependent components: An extensive archive ("PhysioBank") of well-characterized digital recordings of physiologic signals, time series, and related data for use by the biomedical research community. PhysioNet includes collections of cardiopulmonary, neural, and other biomedical signals from healthy subjects and patients with a variety of conditions with major public health implications, including sudden cardiac death, congestive heart failure, epilepsy, gait disorders, sleep apnea, and aging. These collections include data from a wide range of studies, as developed and contributed by members of the research community. PhysioNet also includes clinical and imaging data related to critical care. A large and growing library of software ("PhysioToolkit") for physiologic signal processing and analysis, detection of physiologically significant events using both classical techniques and novel methods based on statistical physics and nonlinear dynamics, interactive display and characterization of signals, creation of new databases, simulation of physiologic and other signals, quantitative evaluation and comparison of analysis methods, and analysis of nonequilibrium and nonstationary processes. A collection of popular tutorials and educational materials, offering expert guidance in approaches for exploring and analysing health data and physiologic signals. A unifying theme for these resources is a focus on the extraction of "hidden" information from biomedical data, providing information that may have diagnostic or prognostic value in medicine, or explanatory or predictive power in basic research. PhysioNet, as noted, is not only the name of the Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals, but also of its web site, physionet.org. The website was established by the Resource as its mechanism for free and open dissemination and exchange of recorded biomedical signals and open-source software for analyzing them, by providing facilities for cooperative analysis of data and evaluation of proposed new algorithms. In addition to providing free electronic access to data and software, the PhysioNet web site offers service and training via on-line tutorials to assist users at entry and more advanced levels. In cooperation with the annual Computing in Cardiology conference, PhysioNet hosts an annual series of challenges, in which researchers and students address unsolved problems of clinical or basic scientific interest using data and software provided by PhysioNet. All data and software included in PhysioNet are carefully reviewed. We invite you to participate in the ongoing review process. By sharing common data sets, and software in source form, the research community benefits from access to materials that have been rigorously scrutinized by many investigators. We further invite researchers to contribute data and software for review and possible inclusion in our resource collection. Please review our guidelines for contributors before submitting material.