Systole: A python package for cardiac signal synchrony and analysis

Abstract

Systole is a package for cardiac signal analysis in Python. It provides an interface for recording cardiac signals via electrocardiography (ECG) or photoplethysmography (PPG), as well as both online and offline data analysis methods extracting cardiac features, synchronizing experimental stimuli with different phases of the heart, removing artefacts at different levels and generating plots for data quality check and publication. Systole is built on the top of Numpy (Harris et al., 2020), Pandas (McKinney, 2010; Pandas Development Team, 2020) and Scipy (Virtanen et al., 2020), and can use both Matplotlib (Hunter, 2007) and Bokeh (Bokeh Development Team, 2018) to generate visualisations. It is designed to build modular pipelines that can interface easily with other signal processing or heart rate variability toolboxes, with a focus on data quality checks. Several parts of the toolbox utilize Numba (Lam et al., 2015) to offer more competitive performances with classic processing algorithms.