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For many tasks, it is often helpful to collect secondary physiological measurements, such as heart-rate over time. The data processing can be rather complicated.
The raw signal (ECG channel recording) must be available in a Matlab variable. For the purpose of this manual, this variable is called data.
Output of help heartbeats:
heartbeats - detect heart beats and frequency in physio data FORMAT: [bp, bs, bf, bv, cp, wgd, wd] = heartbeats(sig [, opts]) Input fields: sig Sx1 numeric signal opts optional settings .bppre pre-defined positions (no detection, only inspection) .cleanup interactive cleanup (default: false) .detlength detection length threshold in seconds (default: 0.05) .pflength pre-filter length in seconds (default: 0.025) .pfreps pre-filter repetitions (default: 2) .freq data frequency in Hz (default: 1000) .plot plot mean +/- std estimate of signal (default: false) .segsize segmentation size in seconds (default: 5) .segstep stepping (window shift) in seconds (default: 1) .windsor windsorizing threshold in std's (default: 3) Output fields: bp beat positions bs beat positions (in seconds) bf frequency estimate for each beat bv values at peak cp estimate of centers of windows (one value less!) wgd guess whether window is good or not wd windowed data (in 100Hz resolution, interpolated) Note: this function is still preliminary
Once the data is loaded, the function call is relatively straight forward. For the “first pass”, cleanup should be enabled, as well as plotting the results:
[bp, bs, bf, bv, cp, wgd, wd] = ... heartbeats(data, struct('cleanup', true, 'plot', true));
This will perform the following steps:
Next, the detected (or provided) beats will analyzed, and any irregularities (that is to say, places where either the distance between beats is too small or too large or the shape of the detected beat does not match the mean signature) will be displayed, one by one, in a small dialog:
The operation is relatively simple:
If no more irregularities remain to be checked, the dialog will close automatically. If you wish, you can also manually close the dialog (prematurely) to go on to the next stage.
In case the plotting has been enabled, the following two displays appear:
This first figure simply shows a representation of the mean (each window is re-sampled to match a 100-sample window length) and the standard deviation, whereas the X-axes is labeled as phase with the peak being located at 0. This display can be helpful in fine-tuning some of the parameters for the function (e.g. the detection length threshold).
The second figure shows the entire signal over time in a 20Hz sampling (in blue) with the detected heart-rate (which is rescaled to 2.5 + BPM/60) super-imposed to control for flaws in the (initial auto-) detection. This can be done by zooming in on a smaller piece of the signal:
Naturally, it is possible to script this function, save the pre-detected heartbeats (without manual interaction/plotting) and then, at a later time, revisit the inspection (for instance, if several subjects' datasets are to be examined, it usually is preferable to perform the extraction and detection of all datasets prior to engaging in the fine tuning).