PhysioNet, PhysioBank, PhysioToolkit

The Research Resource for Complex Physiological Signals (under the auspices of National Center for Research Resources of the National Institute of Health) was created to stimulate investigation in biomedical signals. It includes three components: PhysioBank (a wide set of physiological signals), PhysioToolkit (a library of open source software for physiological signal processing) and PhysioNet (an on-line forum for exchanging physiological signals and open-source for analyzing them). A very interesting introduction can be found here.

Although the data base it is not directed specifically to EEG, EMG or EP, it is open to the incorporation of these signals and, as far as I know, it is the most important public resource by amount of signals and quality of contents.

The data base can be accessed with specific software called WFDB and the signals can be explored in different ways; among them with a nice viewer called gtkwave. Different strategies are suggested to access data from other software:

• Convert files into text format
• Re-implement WFDB library (that can be downloaded from PhysioToolkit) in native code of the application
• Create a set of wrappers that translate between the application and C-arguments passing conventions

We are going to try to use Scilab to illustrate the possibility of its use together with different programs. Although it seems possible to generate a Scilab toolbox using the code of the library, WFDB is developed as a set of UNIX commands that can be used from Scilab. The purpose of these section is to show that the commands can be used directly from inside Scilab and that we can interface the procedures included in WFDB with the procedures included in Scilab