Stimulating Rapid Research Advances Via Focused Competition: The Computers in Cardiology Challenge

Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with a variety of serious health risks. Standard methods for detecting and quantifying sleep apnea are based on respiration monitoring, but previous studies have suggested that apnea detection based on the ECG alone might be possible. We therefore offered a challenge to the research community, to demonstrate the efficacy of ECG-based methods for apnea detection using a large, well-characterized, and representative set of data made freely available via the Internet. The goal of the contest was to stimulate effort and advance the state of the art in this clinically significant problem, and to foster both friendly competition and wide-ranging collaborations. The event was an outstanding success, with most entrants achieving 90% to 100% accuracy in identifying subjects with significant apnea, and minute-by-minute apnea detection accuracy between 85% and 93%, comparable to the concurrence of human experts scoring full polysomnograms.