Header information

[Cristian Drudi]

We have a question regarding the information included in the header files of the ECG datasets.

We've observed that individual ECG recordings within some datasets can be associated with multiple pathologies. We believe that incorporating this information directly into the header files could be useful. If including this information in the header isn't feasible, we would like to know if it's allowed to match the signal IDs with the information contained in the .csv files. Our goal in doing so would be to either filter out specific records for training or to modify the label values based on the information in the .csv files.

An example of what we mean modifying the wfdb example in the challenge description is:

# Age: 68 

# Sex: Female 

# Chagas label: False

# 1dAVb: True

...

# AF: False

# Source: CODE-15%

Thank you very much for your help.

Best regards,

Cristian

[PhysioNet Challenge]

Dear Cristian,

Thanks for the good question.

As you noticed, different data sources have different variables and different data structures, so we have standardized the data formats (WFDB header and signal files with information about the ECGs and patients in the WFDB header files) so that the Challenge approaches can more easily use different and new datasets. If you believe that some of the variables from some of the data sources in the training set would be helpful to have, then please respond to us directly to let us know, and we will try to include them in the header files for the official phase of the Challenge.

Of course, since different datasets provide different information, and since some of the information, such as human ECG annotations, is unlikely to be immediately available when the ECGs are acquired, the validation and test sets are unlikely to have additional information.

We will update the data for the official phase, so please share more of this feedback as you make your final submission during the unofficial phase, which is soon ending on 9th April 2025!

Best,
Matt
(On behalf of the Challenge team.)

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