Getting Started¶
Requirements¶
- Matlab with Signal Processing toolbox. Should work on Matlab R2014b or newer.
- The PhysioNet WFDB tools. The toolbox can install this for you.
Installation¶
- Clone the repo or download the source code.
- From matlab, run the
mhrv_init
function from the root of the repo. This function will:- Check for the presence of the WFDB tools in your system
PATH
. If WFDB tools are not detected, it will attempt to automatically download them for you into the folderbin/wfdb
under the repository root. - Set up your MATLAB path to include the code from this toolbox.
- Check for the presence of the WFDB tools in your system
Notes about matlab’s pwd
and path
¶
Matlab maintains a PWD, or “present working directory”. It’s the folder you see
at the top of the interface, containing the files you see in the file explorer
pane. Type pwd
at the matlab command prompt to see it’s value.
Additionally, matlab maintains a PATH variable, containing a list of folders in
which it searches for function definitions (similar to the shell PATH concept).
Type path
at the matlab command prompt to see it’s value.
You don’t need to change your pwd
to the root of the repo folder for the
toolbox to work. You can simple run the mhrv_init
function from your current
pwd
, and it will take care of updating matlab’s path. For example, if you
cloned or downloaded the toolbox in the folder /Users/myname/mhrv/
, you can
run the following command from the matlab prompt:
run /Users/myname/mhrv/mhrv_init.m
After this the toolbox will be ready to use, regardless of your pwd
.
Manual WFDB Installation (Optional)¶
The above steps should be enough to get most users started. If however you
don’t want mhrv_init
to download the WFDB tools for you, or the automatic
installation fails for some reason, you can install them yourself.
- On OSX, you can use homebrew to install it easily with
brew install wfdb
. - On Windows and Linux, you should either download the WFDB binaries for your OS or compile them from source using the instructions on their website.
Once you have the binaries, place them in some folder on your $PATH
or
somewere under the repo’s root folder (bin/wfdb
would be a good choice as it’s
.gitignore
d) and they will be found and used automatically. Or, if you would
like to manually specify a path outside the repo which contains the WFDB
binaries (e.g. /usr/local/bin
for a homebrew install), you can edit
defaults.yml
and set the mhrv.paths.wfdb_path
variable to the desired path.
For linux users it’s recommended to install from source as the binaries provided on the PhysioNet website are very outdated.