Storage of Biomedical Signals: Comparative Review of Formats and Databases

Current trends in healthcare digitalization make the task of collecting and storing the data of biomedical signals of the subjects relevant. In this article will be described: (i) the existing standard formats of biomedical data files and their comparison in terms of several technical features; (ii) the public databases where biomedical data is accessible, the type of data stored in these databases, how the data is structured. The comparative analysis revealed that the HDF5 file format has the best properties, including compression, speed and ease of access, and the availability of metadata. The most common datasets available online are related to electrocardiography and electroencephalography studies. The comparative review showed that there is a significant reserve that can be used by novice researchers to evaluate the processing algorithms of biomedical signals.