NCKU CBIC ECG Database
Abstract
The NCKU CBIC ECG database collects ECG data from 6 different patients. Each patient collects lead II ECG for four hours a day to highlight patients' different physiological meanings at different times of the day, and the database provides the labels for motion artifact and baseline wandering, which are invalid signal for diagnosis. Prevent physicians from using the noise signal to diagnose. These data were collected using Patch[1] at Tainan Hospital.
Background
Technology and medical treatment are highly developed in the 21st century, and people have more irregular daily routines and greater life pressure. Cardiovascular disease has become a tough nut to crack when the changing of lifestyle is coupled with the aging of society. The age distribution of patients is wider than ever. A wealth of health information can be obtained through electrocardiogram (ECG) measurement, including cardiac arrhythmias. Severe arrhythmias will lead to many life problems, including palpitations, chest tightness, dizziness, shock, and even life-threatening conditions. Therefore, the monitoring of ECG signal is quite essential.
To do our part in the study of arrhythmia, our team started the patient enrollment after gaining the permission of the National Cheng Kung University Hospital Institutional Review Board (NCKUH IRB No. B-ER-104-379) from 2018. We have selected total 128 patients' 24 hours ECG data until now. The results of the arrhythmia label are confirmed by the cardiologist Ju-Yi Chen in NCKUH. Finally, We selected 6 patients from the received signals and made them into a database for researchers to access.
Methods
The NCKU CBIC ECG database contains the ECG recordings from 6 subjects. The signals were collected in Tainan Hospital (Ministry of Health and Welfare) via an ECG acquisition device[1] developed by Your health technology Co., Ltd. The sampling frequency is 400Hz, and the ADC resolution is 12 bits.
The age distribution of subjects was from 24 to 76 years old, and each patient was measured at the lead II for 24 hours. After the signal is recorded, four cleaner segments in the morning, noon, evening, and midnight are selected, and each segment is one hour long. The heartbeat of human body is different when sleeping and awake, and some arrhythmia type occurs at sleeping period often. It's hard to detect some arrhythmia at specific time of a day, therefore, we choose signal segments from different time period for a patient, which is more representative of the daily heartbeat condition. It's worth mentioning that the ECG signals from the 6th subject contains too many noise signals in the daytime due to his career type, so the segments from 22:00 to 02:00 are selected.
We have collected total 128 patients from Tainan Hospital since 2018. Since most of the ECG data of patients are normal beats, we finally selected the ECG data of six patients which contain clinically significant arrhythmia. The database provides two particular label type for motion artifact and baseline wandering, which are caused by body movement during ECG acquisition. In actual situations, cardiologist doesn't use the noise signals as a basis for diagnosis, therefore, these two specific labels prevent physicians from using noise to make a diagnosis.
The original data is first compared with the holter report, and the R peak position and beat labels are manually marked. And then the data were given to a professional cardiologist, Ju-Yi, Chen, for verification. The cardiologist checked the correction and position of beat labels, and chose the acceptable signal segmentation for high quality.
Introduction of Ju-Yi, Chen :
JU-YI CHEN was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1974. He received the M.S. degree from Chang Gung University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan, in 1999 and the Ph.D. degree from the National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, in 2013. Since 2021, he has been a Professor at the Department of Internal Medicine, National Cheng Kung University. His current research interests include the cardiovascular diseases, including arrhythmias, hypertension, arterial stiffness, and cardiac implantable electric devices.
Data Description
The file structure and naming rule are described as follows :
[The subject number]_[The measurement time] : The directory name
- OUTPUT_ECG_data.csv : The one-hour ECG signals ( unit : 0.1V )
- OUTPUT_peak_label.csv : The arrhythmia type label of R-peak
- OUTPUT_peak_position.csv : The position of R-peak
ex : 1_0100 directory contains subject No. 1's data which is measured at 01:00.
Arrhythmia diseases and the corresponding label codes :
Code Arrhythmia Disease
—————————————————————
0 Normal
1 Atrial Fibrillation
2 Supraventricular Tachycardia
3 Premature Ventricular Contraction
4 Atrial Premature Contraction
5 Motion Artifact
6 Wandering
7 First degree AV block
8 Atrial Flutter
PS : Wandering represents baseline drifted by 1mV.
Patient information :
- Subject 1: Male，61 years
- Subject 2: Female，77 years
- Subject 3: Male，63 years
- Subject 4: Male，64 years
- Subject 5: Male，24 years
- Subject 6: Male，64 years
Usage Notes
Few public ECG databases provide long-term ECG, our goal in creating the database is to help understand what a person's ECG looks like in a day, and this database is more valuable in obtaining long-term ECG.
Ethics
Our team has cooperated with National Cheng Kung University Hospital and Tainan Hospital. All the patients enrolled gave their informed consent to participate in the study. The certification of safety-related IEC standards and human study approval are all acquired.
Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that there are no known conflicts of interest.
References
- S.-Y. Lee, P.-W. Huang, M.-C. Liang, J.-H. Hong, and J.-Y. Chen, "Development of an arrhythmia monitoring system and human study," IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 64, no. 4, pp. 442-451, 2018.
