MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database

Overview

The MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database is one of the first publicly available sets of annotated ECG recordings, created by the Beth Israel Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) and MIT in 1980 and made fully open on PhysioNet in 2005.[page:2][web:219]

Data Collection

• 48 half-hour (30-minute) two-channel ambulatory ECG excerpts from 47 subjects studied between 1975 and 1979.[page:2]
• 23 recordings were chosen randomly from a set of 4,000 24-hour ambulatory ECGs from a mixed inpatient (≈60%) and outpatient (≈40%) population; the remaining 25 were selected to include less common but clinically significant arrhythmias.[page:2]
• Recordings were digitized at 360 samples per second per channel with 11-bit resolution over a 10 mV range.[page:2]

Annotations

• Two or more cardiologists independently annotated each record; disagreements were resolved to produce reference annotations for each beat.[page:2]
• Approximately 110,000 beat annotations in total, labeling normal sinus rhythm, premature ventricular contractions, atrial fibrillation, and many other arrhythmia types.[page:2][web:219]

Use Cases

• Benchmarking arrhythmia detection algorithms and wearable ECG devices.[page:2][web:219]
• Training supervised machine learning and deep learning models for cardiac event classification.[page:2]
• Fundamental research into cardiac dynamics and heart rate variability.[page:2]

License

The PhysioNet page states that this database is available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License v1.0, allowing free use with proper attribution.[page:2]