The General Data Format for Biomedical Signals is a scientific and medical data

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

. The aim of GDF is to combine and integrate the best features of all

biosignal A biosignal is any signal in living beings that can be continually measured and monitored. The term biosignal is often used to refer to bioelectrical signals, but it may refer to both electrical and non-electrical signals. The usual understandin ...

file formats into a single file format. The original GDF specification was introduced in 2005 as a new data format to overcome some of the limitations of the European Data Format for Biosignals (EDF). GDF was also designed to unify a number of file formats which had been designed for very specific applications (for example, in

ECG Electrocardiography is the process of producing an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG), a recording of the heart's electrical activity. It is an electrogram of the heart which is a graph of voltage versus time of the electrical activity of the hear ...

research and

EEG Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex ...

analysis). The original specification included a binary header, and used an event table. An updated specification (GDF v2) was released in 2011 and added fields for additional subject-specific information (gender, age, etc.) and utilized several standard codes for storing physical units and other properties. In 2015, the Austrian Standardization Institute made GDF an official Austrian Standard https://shop.austrian-standards.at/action/en/public/details/553360/OENORM_K_2204_2015_11_15, and the revision number has been updated to v3. The GDF format is often used in

brain–computer interface A brain–computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a brain–machine interface (BMI) or smartbrain, is a direct communication pathway between the brain, brain's electrical activity and an external device, most commonly a computer or robotic l ...

research. However, since GDF provides a superset of features from many different file formats, it could be also used for many other domains. The free and open source software BioSig library provides implementations for reading and writing of GDF in

GNU Octave GNU Octave is a high-level programming language primarily intended for scientific computing and numerical computation. Octave helps in solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a langu ...

MATLAB MATLAB (an abbreviation of "MATrix LABoratory") is a proprietary multi-paradigm programming language and numeric computing environment developed by MathWorks. MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation ...

and C/

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

. A lightweight C++ library called libGDF is also available and implements version 2 of the GDF format.

External links

GDF v2.0 specification

OeNORM K2204:2015

References

{{reflist, 2 Bioinformatics Standards for electronic health records Computer file formats

See also

External links

References