Starting the official phase for the PhysioNet Challenge 2024

[PhysioNet Challenge]

Dear Challengers,

We are pleased to announce the beginning of the official phase of the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2024: Digitization and Classification of ECG Images:
https://physionetchallenges.org/2024/

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

• updates to the synthetic ECG image generation code in ECG-Image-Kit, including annotations of the generated images and masked and unmasked versions of the WFDB files to allow you to more easily generate more diverse synthetic ECG image files;
• updates to the data, including new diagnostic, morphology, and rhythm classes and a new validation set with actual scans or photographs of paper ECGs;
• simplifications to the example code to make participation in the digitization and/or classification tasks easier; and
  
• the ability to submit containerized MATLAB entries with additional dependencies.
  

These changes, made in response to your feedback, are intended to improve the Challenge, but we have not changed the fundamental tasks of the Challenge: the digitization and/or classification of ECG images.

Any code from the unofficial phase will not run as-is in the official phase, but you should be able to run it with minor updates to the data and your code. Please see the example and scoring code for updates:
https://github.com/physionetchallenges/python-example-2024
https://github.com/physionetchallenges/matlab-example-2024
https://github.com/physionetchallenges/evaluation-2024

We will start processing official phase submissions after about a week to allow for questions or comments about these changes (and potential bug fixes), so please share any questions or comments that you may have about these changes in particular or the Challenge in general.

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):
https://physionetchallenges.org/2024/submissions/

The reviews of your Computing in Cardiology abstracts are nearly finished, and we look forward to sharing the results with you in the coming weeks.

Best,

The PhysioNet Challenge Organizers

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