Welcome to the ecg-kit !

This toolbox is a collection of Matlab tools that I used, adapted or developed during my PhD and post-doc work with the Biomedical Signal Interpretation & Computational Simulation (BSiCoS) group at University of Zaragoza, Spain and at the National Technological University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The ECG-kit has tools for reading, processing and presenting results, as you can see in the documentation or in these demos on Youtube.

The main feature of the this toolbox is the possibility to use several popular algorithms for ECG processing, such as:

Algorithms from Physionet's WFDB software package
QRS detectors, such as gqrs, wqrs, wavedet, ecgpuwave, Pan & Tompkins, EP limited
Wavedet ECG delinator
Pulse wave detectors as wabp and wavePPG
a2hbc and EP limited heartbeat classifiers.
And other scritps for inspecting, correcting and reporting all these results.

with the same application programmer interface (API) directly in Matlab, under Windows or Linux. The kit also implements a recording interface which allows processing several ECG formats, such as HL7-aECG, MIT, ISHNE, HES, Mortara, and AHA, of arbitrary recording size (the record so far is a 1 week recording of 3 leads, sampled at 500 Hz).

A note for Mac users: the kit was debuged and tested in a VirtualBox environment running OS X El Capitan. Example scripts were tested but we are not sure if it works in the actual Mac hardware. We encourage Mac users to send us feedback and bugs through the forum.

News

The annotated ECG (aECG) HL7 format is now accepted by ecg-kit. The Chinese Cardiovascular Disease Database (CCDD) is stored in HL7-aECG format, and recently it was made publicly available to the community. Here are some screenshots of the kit accessing these recordings.

>> ECGw = ECGwrapper( 'recording_name', '/path_to_data/1.xml')
>> plot_ecg_strip(ECGw)

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As you can note, the database includes several wave annotations to validate ECG delineators.

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Installation

The easiest way to install the latest stable version is downloading the project in zip or tgz. If you want the latest development version, clone the master branch with your favorite GIT client. Here you can find one for each supported platform, and a nice GUI for Windows called Tortoise. Then go to an empty folder, right click there and select Git Clone

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or execute in the shell:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/marianux/ecg-kit.git

To install the kit, after unpacking or cloning the kit to ‘your_installation_folder’, then type in Matlab:

cd 'your_installation_folder'
InstallECGkit()

You can try then the your_installation_folder/examples/examples.m script in order to check the correct installation in some included recordings:

examples()

These screenshots where generated with the example script.

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This kit also includes many open-source projects such as WFDB Toolbox for MATLAB and Octave from Physionet, PRtools, Libra, export_fig from undocumented Matlab, and other open-source scripts that have their proper references to the original projects or authors.

The following Youtube playlist exemplifies several common processing tasks performed with ecg-kit, such as QRS detection and ECG delineation among others. Also it shows how to install and uninstall the kit.

This is the forum for ecg-kit's users, feel free to join, say hello and ask for help.

Voluntary contributions

Many thanks to Andrés Demski from UTN who helped to this project before he learned how to use it. To all the friends in Zaragoza, Porto and Lund, but in special to the ones closest to the project:

Pablo Laguna, Juan Pablo Martínez, Rute Almeida and Juan Bolea, for the wavedet ECG delineator and many parts of the Biosig browser project that were adapted to this project.
Jesús Lázaro and Eduardo Gil for the PPG / ABP pulse detection code.
Li-wei Lehman from Physionet/MIT helped a lot in testing the first versions of the kit.

Involuntary contributions

The acknowledgements also goes to all these people, important in many ways to the fulfilment of this project

George Moody, Wei Zong, Ikaro Silva, for all the software of Physionet.
Reza Sameni, for his Open-Source ECG Toolbox (OSET)
Bob Duin and all the team behind PRtools
Yair Altman from undocumented Matlab
Al genio inspirador por esto.

How to cite

If you find this toolbox useful please cite the following article:

1. Demski AJ, Llamedo Soria M. ecg-kit a Matlab Toolbox for Cardiovascular Signal Processing. Journal of Open Research Software. 2016;4(1):e8. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/jors.86