The subject of the PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2020 was the identification of cardiac abnormalities in 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. A total of 66,405 recordings were sourced from hospital systems from four distinct countries and annotated with clinical diagnoses, including 43,101 annotated recordings that were posted publicly.For this Challenge, we asked participants to design working, open-source algorithms for identifying cardiac abnormalities in 12-lead ECG recordings. This Challenge provided several innovations. First, we sourced data from multiple institutions from around the world with different demographics, allowing us to assess the generalizability of the algorithms. Second, we required participants to submit both their trained models and the code for reproducing their trained models from the training data, which aids the generalizability and reproducibility of the algorithms. Third, we proposed a novel evaluation metric that considers different misclassification errors for different cardiac abnormalities, reflecting the clinical reality that some diagnoses have similar outcomes and varying risks.Over 200 teams submitted 850 algorithms (432 of which successfully ran) during the unofficial and official phases of the Challenge, representing a diversity of approaches from both academia and industry for identifying cardiac abnormalities. The official phase of the Challenge is ongoing.

Cardiac auscultation is one of the most costeffective techniques used to detect and identify many heart conditions. Computer-assisted decision systems based on auscultation can support physicians in their decisions. Unfortunately, the application of such systems in clinical trials is still minimal since most of them only aim to detect the presence of extra or abnormal waves in the phonocardiogram signal, i.e., only a binary ground truth variable (normal vs abnormal) is provided. This is mainly due to the lack of large publicly available datasets, where a more detailed description of such abnormal waves (e.g., cardiac murmurs) exists.To pave the way to more effective research on healthcare recommendation systems based on auscultation, our team has prepared the currently largest pediatric heart sound dataset. A total of 5282 recordings have been collected from the four main auscultation locations of 1568 patients, in the process, 215780 heart sounds have been manually annotated. Furthermore, and for the first time, each cardiac murmur has been manually annotated by an expert annotator according to its timing, shape, pitch, grading, and quality. In addition, the auscultation locations where the murmur is present were identified as well as the auscultation location where the murmur is detected more intensively. Such detailed description for a relatively large number of heart sounds may pave the way for new machine learning algorithms with a real-world application for the detection and analysis of murmur waves for diagnostic purposes.

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Objective: Cardiac auscultation is an accessible diagnostic screening tool that can help to identify patients with heart murmurs for follow-up diagnostic screening and treatment, especially in resource-constrained environments. However, experts are needed to interpret the heart sound recordings, limiting the accessibility of auscultation for cardiac care. The George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2022 invites teams to develop automated approaches for detecting abnormal heart function from multi-location phonocardiogram (PCG) recordings of heart sounds. Approach: For the Challenge, we sourced 5272 PCG recordings from 1568 pediatric patients in rural Brazil. We required the Challenge participants to submit the complete code for training and running their models, improving the transparency, reproducibility, and utility of the diagnostic algorithms. We devised a cost-based evaluation metric that captures the costs of screening, treatment, and diagnostic errors, allowing us to investigate the benefits of algorithmic pre-screening and facilitate the development of more clinically relevant algorithms. Main results: So far, over 80 teams have submitted over 600 algorithms during the course of the Challenge, representing a diversity of approaches in academia and industry. We will update this manuscript to share an analysis of the Challenge after the end of the Challenge. Significance: The use of heart sound recordings for both heart murmur detection and clinical outcome identification allowed us to explore the potential of automated approaches to provide accessible pre-screening of less-resourced populations. The submission of working, open-source algorithms and the use of novel evaluation metrics supported the reproducibility, generalizability, and relevance of the researched conducted during the Challenge.

We have made an important step toward making classification of resuscitation rhythms more efficient in the sense of minimal feedback from human experts.