PhysioTag: An Open-Source Platform for Collaborative Annotation of Physiological Waveforms

To develop robust algorithms for automated diagnosis of medical conditions such as cardiac arrhythmias, researchers require large collections of data with human expert annotations. Currently, there is a lack of accessible, open-source platforms for human experts to collaboratively develop these annotated datasets through a web interface. In this work, we developed a flexible, generalizable, web-based framework to enable multiple users to create and share annotations on multi-channel physiological waveforms. Using the developed annotation platform, we carried out a pilot study to assess the validity of ventricular tachycardia (VT) alarms from multiple commercial monitors. Thus far, four clinical experts have used this annotation tool to annotate a total of 5,658 VT alarm events, among which approximately 44%(N=2,468) have been labeled by two independent annotators.