Launching the official phase of the PhysioNet Challenge 2026

[PhysioNet Challenge]

Dear Challengers,

We are pleased to announce the beginning of the official phase of the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2026: Screening for Cognitive Impairment During Sleep Studies:

https://physionetchallenges.org/2026/.

For the official phase of this year’s Challenge, we have made many changes to improve the Challenge, including:

• updated and simplified criteria for patients with and without cognitive impairment, including a more uniform time window across sites closer to the time of the sleep study;

• updated training, validation, and test sets, including "small" (~200 GB) and "large" (~1.2 GB) versions of the training set that teams can choose to use;

• new scoring metrics that condition on age, recognizing that older patients are more likely to have cognitive impairment and rewarding algorithms for identifying younger patients with cognitive impairment; and

• updated example and scoring code that implement these changes.

These changes, made in response to our observations and your feedback during the unofficial phase, help to improve the Challenge, but we have not changed the fundamental task of the Challenge: using sleep studies to identify future cognitive impairment diagnoses.

Please see the data section of the website for updates to the data:

http://physionetchallenges.org/2026/#data-access

Your code from the unofficial phase may not run as-is in the official phase, but you should be able to run it with minor updates. Please see the example and scoring code for updates to the example and scoring code:

https://github.com/physionetchallenges/python-example-2026

We will start evaluating official phase submissions after about a week to allow for questions and comments about these changes (and potential bug fixes), so please share any feedback that you may have as soon as possible.

Please see the Challenge webpage for details, update and double check your code to include all of the promising ideas that you've had since the end of the unofficial phase, and submit it for evaluation on the validation set when ready (but after a week or so to allow for feedback and potential changes in response to feedback):

https://physionetchallenges.org/2026/submissions/

The reviews of your Computing in Cardiology abstracts are nearly finished. We look forward to sharing the results with you in the coming weeks and seeing you and discussing your work in Madrid in September.

Best,

The PhysioNet Challenge Organizers

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