WFDB Applications Guide: Introduction

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# Introduction

Most of this guide consists of UNIX man pages that describe the applications included in the WFDB (Waveform Database) Software Package. If you are unfamiliar with the format of UNIX man pages, it may be helpful to refer to the introduction of a UNIX reference manual for orientation. The descriptions are intentionally terse; this is a reference manual and not a tutorial introduction to the software described within. In those cases for which relevant tutorial material exists elsewhere, references appear in the SEE ALSO sections of each man page.

The organization follows the traditional arrangement of the UNIX Reference Manual: section 1 contains programs, section 3 contains libraries, and section 5 contains file formats. In the UNIX Reference Manual, sections 2 and 4 are reserved for system calls and device interfaces respectively; these sections do not exist in this guide.

If you have not used any of these programs before, you should be sure that your environment is set up properly so that WFDB applications can find their input files. See setwfdb(1) for information about doing this; a more detailed discussion may be found in the first chapter of the WFDB Programmer's Guide, in the section about the database path.

Certain types of command arguments are used by many of the applications described in this guide. These include:

record
  Where this appears, substitute the name of a WFDB record. MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database record names are 3-digit numbers, AHA Database record names are 4-digit numbers, and European ST-T Database record names begin with lowercase ``e`', followed by a 4-digit number. Record names may contain letters, digits, and underscores. Case is significant in record names that contain letters, even in environments such as MS-DOS for which case translation is normally performed by the operating system on file names; thus ``e0104`' is the name of a record found in the European ST-T Database, whereas ``E0104`' is not. Under MS-DOS, furthermore, only the first eight characters of a record name are significant. A record name is not a file name. See the WFDB Programmer's Guide for further details on record names.
annotator
  Where this appears, substitute an annotator name. The annotator name ``atruth`' (shortened to ``atr`' under MS-DOS and on CD-ROMs) is used to name the set of reference annotations supplied by the database developers. Annotator names may contain letters, digits, and underscores, as for record names. Note that, under MS-DOS, only the first three characters of an annotator name are significant.
time
  Where this appears, substitute a string in standard time format. Time arguments generally specify elapsed times from the beginning of the record (for exceptions to this rule, see the section on the `strtim` function in the WFDB Programmer's Guide). Examples of standard time format:

  2:14.875 | 2 minutes + 14.875 seconds
  143 | 143 seconds (2 minutes + 23 seconds)
  4:02:01 | 4 hours + 2 minutes + 1 second
  4:2:1 | same as above
  s12345 | 12345 sample intervals
  e | time of the end of the record

signal
  Where this appears, substitute a signal number. Signal numbers are integers; the first signal in each record is signal 0. In printed documentation for the databases, signals always appear with signal 0 at the top, signal 1 beneath, etc. Where the notation `signal-list' (or `signal ...') appears in this guide, you may specify more than one signal in any desired order; separate the signal numbers using spaces.

Under UNIX, if the WFDB Software Package has been installed on your system, you can also access the information contained in this guide using `man` and related programs. In some cases you may need to add `/usr/local/man` to your `MANPATH` environment variable, in order to make these pages accessible to `man`.

Your comments on this guide, and on the software that it documents, are welcome. Please send them to:

20 May 1999