The release of the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database on CD-ROM with accompanying software significantly improved the accessibility of a massive annotated ECG dataset for arrhythmia research.
A compact-disk ROM containing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-Boston's Beth Israel Hospital (BIH) Arrhythmia Database as well as a large number of supplementary recordings assembled for various research projects was produced. In all, the CD-ROM contains approximately 600 megabytes of digitized electrocardiograms (ECG) recordings, most with beat-by-beat annotations, having a total duration in excess of 200 hours. The CD-ROM format makes this substantial collection of ECGs accessible to researchers with PCs as well as those with larger computer systems. The contents of the CD-ROM and the issues involved in its production are described. Software for use with the CD-ROM as well as for development of similar databases is also described. >
Moody et al. (Wed,) studied this question.