The PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology (CinC) Challenge 2017 focused on differentiating AF from noise, normal or other rhythms in short term (from 9–61 s) ECG recordings performed by patients. A total of 12,186 ECGs were used: 8,528 in the public training set and 3,658 in the private hidden test set. Due to the high degree of inter-expert disagreement between a significant fraction of the expert labels we implemented a mid-competition bootstrap approach to expert relabeling of the data, levering the best performing Challenge entrants’ algorithms to identify contentious labels. A total of 75 independent teams entered the Challenge using a variety of traditional and novel methods, ranging from random forests to a deep learning approach applied to the raw data in the spectral domain. Four teams won the Challenge with an equal high F1 score (averaged across all classes) of 0.83, although the top 11 algorithms scored within 2% of this. A combination of 45 algorithms identified using LASSO achieved an F1 of 0.87, indicating that a voting approach can boost performance.

The abdominal electrocardiogram (ECG) provides a non-invasive method for monitoring the fetal cardiac activity in pregnant women. However, the temporal and frequency overlap between the fetal ECG (FECG), the maternal ECG (MECG) and noise results in a challenging source separation problem. This work seeks to compare temporal extraction methods for extracting the fetal signal and estimating fetal heart rate. A novel method for MECG cancelation using an echo state neural network (ESN) based filtering approach was compared with the least mean square (LMS), the recursive least square (RLS) adaptive filter and template subtraction (TS) techniques. Analysis was performed using real signals from two databases composing a total of 4 h 22 min of data from nine pregnant women with 37,452 reference fetal beats. The effects of preprocessing the signals was empirically evaluated. The results demonstrate that the ESN based algorithm performs best on the test data with an F1 measure of 90.2% as compared to the LMS (87.9%), RLS (88.2%) and the TS (89.3%) techniques. Results suggest that a higher baseline wander high pass cut-off frequency than traditionally used for FECG analysis significantly increases performance for all evaluated methods. Open source code for the benchmark methods are made available to allow comparison and reproducibility on the public domain data.

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a well studied signal from which many clinically relevant parameters can be derived, such as heart rate. A key component in the estimation of these parameters is the accurate detection of the R peak in the QRS complex. While corruption of the ECG by movement artefact or sensor failure can result in poor delineation of the R peak, use of synchronously measured signals could allow for resolution of the R peak even scenarios with poor quality ECG recordings. Robust estimation of R peak locations from multimodal signals facilitates real time monitoring and is likely to reduce false alarms due to inaccurate derived parameters.We propose a method which fuses R peaks detected on the ECG using an energy detector with those detected on the arterial blood pressure (ABP) waveform using the length transform. A signal quality index (SQI) for the two signals is then derived. The ECG SQI is based upon the agreement between two distinct peak detectors. The ABP SQI estimates the blood pressure at various phases in the cardiac cycle and only accepts the signal as good quality if the values are physiologically plausible. Detections from these two signals were merged by selecting the R peak detections from the signal with a higher SQI. The approach presented in this paper was evaluated on datasets provided for the Physionet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2014. The algorithm achieved a sensitivity of 95.1% and positive predictive value of 89.3% on an external evaluation set, and achieved a score of 91.5%.The method here demonstrated excellent performance across a variety of signal morphologies collected during clinical practice. Fusion of R peaks from other signals has the potential to provide informed estimates of the R peak location in situations where the ECG is noisy or completely absent. Source code for the algorithm is made available freely online.

The risk stratification of patients in the emergency department begins at triage. It is vital to stratify patients early based on their severity, since undertriage can lead to increased morbidity, mortality and costs. Our aim was to present a new approach to assist healthcare professionals at triage in the stratification of patients and in identifying those with higher risk of ICU admission. Adult patients assigned Manchester Triage System (MTS) or Emergency Severity Index (ESI) 1 to 3 from a Portuguese and a United States Emergency Departments were analyzed. Variables routinely collected at triage were used and natural language processing was applied to the patient chief complaint. Stratified random sampling was applied to split the data in train (70%) and test (30%) sets and 10-fold cross validation was performed for model training. Logistic regression, random forests, and a random undersampling boosting algorithm were used. We compared the performance obtained with the reference model-using only triage priorities-with the models using additional variables. For both hospitals, a logistic regression model achieved higher overall performance, yielding areas under the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves of 0.91 (95% CI 0.90-0.92) and 0.30 (95% CI 0.27-0.33) for the United States hospital and of 0.85 (95% CI 0.83-0.86) and 0.06 (95% CI 0.05-0.07) for the Portuguese hospital. Heart rate, pulse oximetry, respiratory rate and systolic blood pressure were the most important predictors of ICU admission. Compared to the reference models, the models using clinical variables and the chief complaint presented higher recall for patients assigned MTS/ESI 3 and can identify patients assigned MTS/ESI 3 who are at risk for ICU admission.