Development of the Long Term ST Database (LTST DB)
started in January 1995 under the
joint project between the FCIS (Ljubljana) and MIT (Boston) sponsored by the
U.S.-Slovenian Science and Technology Joint Fund Secretariat which yielded in a
database of eleven 24-hour annotated ambulatory records. In 1997, Medtronic, Inc.
agreed to sponsor further development of the database. At that time, the
research groups from ICP (Pisa), BIDMC (Boston) and UMC (Ljubljana) joined
to the project. In 1999, Zymed, Inc. agreed to additionaly sponsor the
project in order to add a set of three lead ambulatory records. Goals of the
LTST DB are to represent the wide variety of ``real-world'' data with many
examples of significant non-ischemic ST events to gain development of improved
algorithms to differentiate ischemic ST episodes from non-ischemic ST events,
to include variety of temporal patterns in ST level on long run to enable
researchers to study lengthly physiologic mechanisms and dynamics of ischemia,
to include variety of rhythm abnormalities to enable studies on their
correlations with ischemic ST episodes, and to permit more reliable prediction
of clinical performance from the first-order performance statistics due
to long duration records. In our previous report, we explained aspects and
reasons for development of the LTST DB, and reported current status of protocols
and annotating of transient ST events [1]. As the pool of collected
and annotated records has grown, the characteristics of transient ST events became
more clear. It was necessary to enhance definitions of transient ST events as
well as annotation protocol to accurately cover all possible characteristics
and origins of ST events. The aim of this paper is to report the final design and
construction of the database. We present the selection criteria for records,
improved annotation protocol with definitions of significant transient ST events,
annotating procedure, improved tools to identify, classify and semiautomaticaly
annotate ST events, and present the content of the records of the database.