The PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2015 Announcement

The PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2015 is now open! This year's challenge is 'Reducing False Arrhythmia Alarms in the ICU'. False alarms in the ICU can lead to a disruption of care, impacting both the patient and the clinical staff through noise disturbances, desensitization to warnings and slowing of response times, leading to decreased quality of care. False alarm rates can be as high as 90% or more. To address this issue we have developed an expert-labelled data set of 1250 life-threatening arrhythmia alarms with five minutes of electrophysiological and pulsatile waveform data leading up to each alarm event. Competitors are challenged to devise a method of processing all the available data to reduce false alarms with minimal or no effect on true (vital) alarms.

A training set of waveform data (electrophysiological and pulsatile waveforms) recorded concurrently with 750 alarms have been made available on PhysioNet.org.

A hidden test set will be used to evaluate your code's performance. Scoring of your entries via a sandbox will be available later this month.

Key dates: All competitors must submit at least one entry by the 7th April in order to have one scored algorithm. They must report this score in an abstract submitted to Computing in Cardiology (cinc2015.org) by the abstract submission deadline of April 15. Improvements to algorithms can be made until the competition closes on the 20th August. A four page paper with the final results must be submitted to the conference shortly afterwards, and one of the team must attend the conference to present the results.

Prizes of up to $1000 in each category will be offered, with winners announced in September at Computing in Cardiology 2015, in Nice, France. We hope to see many of you there!

More detailed rules and other information can be found at www.physionet.org/challenge/2015/.