If you are using this software, please cite:
Vest A, Da Poian G, Li Q, Liu C, Nemati S, Shah A, Clifford GD,
"An Open Source Benchmarked Toolbox for Cardiovascular Waveform and Interval Analysis",
Physiological measurement 39, no. 10 (2018): 105004. DOI:10.5281/zenodo.1243111; 2018.
The PhysioNet Cardiovascular Signal Toolbox is a a cardiovascular dynamics analysis package, designed to meet the need in the clinical and scientific community for a validated, standardized, well-documented open-source toolkit to evaluate the relationships between physiological signals and disease. The package not only includes standard HRV tools to generate time and frequency domain metrics from ECG or pulsatile waveforms (like the blood pressure or photoplethysmographic waveforms), but more recent metrics such as acceleration and deceleration capacity and pulse transit time. The package is designed to accommodate a variety of input data, from raw unprocessed and unannotated waveforms, to fully annotated tachogram data. In general, abnormal beat and noise removal and methods for dealing with the missing data are poorly described and highly variant in most of the literature. Therefore, we have included signal processing methods that include state of the art peak detectors, signal quality processing units, and beat/rhythm phenotyping. The package can also analyze the interactions between multiple physiological signals.
System requirements:
- Matlab and License https://www.mathworks.com/
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Download and install Matlab 2017b (v9.3) (required Matlab Toolboxes: Signal Processing Toolbox, and Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox, Neural Network Toolbox)
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Add the PhysioNet Cardiovascular Signal Toolbox to your Matlab path: run startup.m
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(Optional) rrgen binary - compilation of rrgenV3.c on your system:
1. Compile rrgen Navigate to rrgen in HRV Toolbox & Compile using gcc gcc -Wall rrgenV3.c -lm -o rrgen or gcc -Wall -o rrgenV3 rrgenV3.c 2. Ensure executable is on the system path, or move executable to usr/local/bin or similar location on the path 3. Ensure executable is on Matlab's path using the addpath fn
- Review InitializeHRVparams.m and optimize the parameters for your data.
- The toolbox does not assume any format of data except that the input of the Main_HRV_Analysis.m fucntion are a two equal length vectors: RR interval and time in units of seconds or the 'raw' ECG signal (physical units,mV) and time. Additionaly, blood pressure waveform and photoplethysmographic/pulsatile data can be analyzed and they should be in the standard physical units (mmHg or normalized units respectively).
- Results will be stored in folder called as indicated in the InitializeHRVparams.m If the folder does not exist, it will be created.
The following metrics are output from the HRV Toolbox:
- t_start : (s) Start time of each window analyzed
- t_end : (s) End time of each window analyzed
- NNmean : (ms) mean value of NN intervals
- NNmode : (ms) mode of NN intervals
- NNmedian : (ms) median value of NN intervals
- NNskew : skweness of NN intervals
- NNkurt : kurtosis of NN intervals
- NNiqr : interquartile range of NN intervals
- SDNN : (ms) Standard deviation of all NN intervals.
- RMSSD : (ms) The square root of the mean of the sum of the squares
of differences between adjacent NN intervals.
- pnn50 : (%) NN50 count divided by the total number of all NN intervals.
(Number of pairs of adjacent NN intervals differing by more than 50 ms )
- tdflag : 2 = not enough high SQI data in the window to process
(amount of data above threshold1 is greater than threshold2)
3 = not enough data in the window
4 = window is missing too much data
5 = success
- ulf : (ms^2) Power in the ultra low frequency range (default < 0.003 Hz)
- vlf : (ms^2) Power in very low frequency range (default 0.003 <= vlf < 0.04 Hz)
- lf : (ms^2) Power in low frequency range (default 0.04Hz <= lf < 0.15 Hz)
- hf : (ms^2) Power in high frequency range (default 0.15 <= hf < 0.4 Hz)
- lfhf : Ratio LF [ms^2]/HF [ms^2]
- ttlpwr : (ms^2) Total spectral power (approximately <0.4 Hz)
- fdflag : 1 = Lomb Periodogram or other method failed
2 = not enough high SQI data in the window to process
(amount of data above threshold1 is greater than threshold2)
3 = not enough data in the window
4 = window is missing too much data
5 = success
- PRSA - AC : (ms) acceleration capacity
- PRSA - DC : (ms) deceleration capacity
- SDANN : (ms) Standard deviation of the average of NN intervals
in all 5-minute segments of a long recording
- SDNNI : (ms) Mean of the standard deviation in all 5-minute
segments of a long recording
- SampEn : (a.u.) Sample entropy, which measures the regularity and complexity of a time series
- ApEn : (a.u.)Approximate entropy, which measures the regularity and complexity of a time series
- MSE : First column contains the scale factors, and the second
column provides the corresponding entropy values
- DFA - alpha1 : Short range fractal scaling exponents (default 4<=n<16)
- DFA - alpha2 : Long range fractal scaling exponents (default 16<=n<length/4)
Poincaré plot (PP)
- SD1 : (ms) standard deviation of projection of the PP
on the line perpendicular to the line of identity (y=-x)
- SD2 : (ms) standard deviation of the projection of the PP on
the line of identity (y=x)
- SD2/SD1 : (ms) SD1/SD2 ratio
- TO : (%) turbulence onset
- TS : turbulence slope
Using Main_HRV_Analysis.m, Analyze_ABP_PPG_Waveforms.m to analyze the ECG, PPG and/or ABP the function will return an annotation file with the locations of detected QRS peaks or PPG/ABP onsets:
ECG : *.jqrs (for jqrs detector)
*.wqrs (for wqrs detector)
*.sqrs (for sqrs detector)
PPG : *.ppg (for PPG onset)
ABP : *.abp (for ABP onset)
To read these files use the [read_ann.m] function included in the toolbox:
QRS_locations = read_ann('fileName', 'jqrs')
PPG_onsets = read_ann('fileName','ppg')
Note that QRS locations and PPG/ABP onstets are in samples not in seconds
The SQI values are also saved as annotations files both for ECG and PPG/ABP
For ECG the SQI values are saved as a number from 0 to 100 in a file with extension:
*.sqijw : comparison of jqrs wrt wqrs detection
*.sqijs : comparison of jqrs wrt sqrs detection
read these files as follows
[sqiTime,~,sqiValue] = read_ann('fileName' , 'sqijw')
For PPG and ABP two different values of SQI are seved in each annotation files and they are related to a specific 'beat', one is a char value (E: excellent beat, A: acceptable beat, Q: unaceptable beat) and the other value is an integer in the range 0-100 given by the average of three SQI values (see PPG_SQI_buf.m)
read *.ppgsqi files as follows
[ppgAnn, ppgSQI, ppgSQInum] = read_ann('fileName', 'sqippg')