GDF - A general dataformat for biosignals

TL;DR

This paper introduces GDF, a comprehensive and standardized data format for biomedical signals, along with open-source software tools for reading, writing, and converting various existing formats to GDF.

Contribution

It presents a new general-purpose data format for biomedical signals and provides open-source tools for its implementation and data conversion.

Findings

GDF is fully specified and standardized.

Software tools for GDF are available in multiple programming languages.

Converters from existing formats to GDF are provided.

Abstract

Biomedical signals are stored in many different data formats. Most formats have been developed for a specific purpose of a specialized community for ECG research, EEG analysis, sleep research, etc. So far none of the existing formats can be considered a general purpose data format for biomedical signals. In order to solve this problem and to unify the various needs of the various biomedical signal processing fields, the so-called "General Data Format for biomedical signals" (GDF) is developed. This GDF format is fully described and specified. Software for reading and writing GDF data is implemented in Octave/Matlab and C/C++ and provided through BioSig - an free and open source software library for biomedical signal processing. BioSig privides also converters from various data formats to GDF, and a viewing and scoring software.