Electrocardiogram (ecg)

Following the BIDS Physiological recordings specification, M-BIDS uses the following additional Calibench requirements for ECG data.

In addition to the BIDS _physio.tsv.gz / _physio.json pair, ECG data MUST use the recording label ecg and should be organized as follows:

physio/
├── sub-<participant_label>_task-acquisition_recording-ecg_physio.json
└── sub-<participant_label>_task-acquisition_recording-ecg_physio.tsv.gz

Column names in the ecg data files MUST be timestamp followed by ecg for experiments involving single recordings. For simultaneous parallel ECG recordings from different locations on the body, use timestamp followed by ecg1, ecg2, ecg3, and so on.

These fields MUST be included in the JSON sidecar file: <matches>_recording-ecg_physio.json

Additional Metadata Fields

Table 1: Required ECG-specific JSON fields

Key	Description	Data Type	Possible Values
Placement	Configuration of the recorded ECG leads	Text	I, II, III, aVF, aVR, aVL, V1, V2, V3, V4, V5, V6, other

Example TSV Data File

Compressed *.tsv.gz files are headerless. The columns are defined by the JSON sidecar.

0.0 -0.093841552734375
0.0004999999999881766       -0.096282958984375
0.0009999999999763531       -0.097808837890625
. . .

In this example, the sidecar Columns value is ["timestamp", "ecg"].

Example JSON Sidecar

{
    "Columns": [
        "timestamp",
        "ecg"
    ],
    "Manufacturer": "Biopac Systems",
    "ManufacturersModelName": "ECG100C",
    "DeviceSerialNumber": "1711008598",
    "SoftwareVersion": "Biopac AcqKnowledge 5.0.2",
    "StartTime": 0.0,
    "PhysioType": "generic",
    "timestamp": {
        "LongName": "Time",
        "Description": "a continuously increasing identifier of the sampling time registered by the device",
        "Origin": "System startup",
        "Units": "s"
    },
    "ecg": {
        "Description": "ECG Recording",
        "Placement": "underneath the right clavicle, as well as the left and right costal margin",
        "Units": "mV"
    },
    "SamplingFrequency": 2000.0,
    "TrimPoints": [
        882.7075,
        1530.7065
    ],
    "Duration": 647.999
}