Reproducing the Analysis

These pages provide instructions on how to reproduce the analysis of the pulse wave database reported in this article. These are provided for two reasons.

Firstly, these instructions allow other researchers to reproduce the work described in the article, ensuring that the methodology is documented in its entirety.

Secondly, this process may be a useful starting point for researchers using the database for their own research.

Requirements

Broadly, the three items required to reproduce the analysis are:

• The PWDB database: in Matlab ® format.
• pwdb code: the code used to analyse the database, including the analyse_pwdb.m and PulseAnalyse.m scripts.
• Matlab ®: the software for which the pwdb code is written.

Steps

The steps required to reproduce the analysis of the Pulse Wave Database are:

1. Create a folder in which to store the analysis of the database, called pwdb_1.
2. Create a subfolder within this folder called exported_data (i.e this subfolder will have the path .../pwdb_1/exported_data/ ).
3. Obtain a copy of the PWDB in Matlab ® format from here. This file is called pwdb_data.mat. Save it in the exported_data folder (i.e. with the path .../pwdb_1/exported_data/pwdb_data.mat).
4. [optional] If you also wish to analyse how the pulse wave shape changes as it propagates through the arterial tree, then you will also need a copy of the PWDB in Matlab ® format with the path data (called pwdb_data_w_paths.mat), which is available here. Save it in the exported_data folder too (i.e. with the path .../pwdb_1/exported_data/pwdb_data_w_paths.mat).
5. Download the pwdb code, and extract the contents from this compressed folder.
6. Open the setup_paths_for_post_processing.m script from within the code, and adjust PATHS.storage_folder to the path of the folder containing the pwdb_1 folder (and save the change). e.g. if the path of the PWDB data is C:/Desktop/pwdb_1/exported_data/pwdb_data.mat, then the script should be modified to read: PATHS.storage_folder = 'C:/Desktop/';
7. Run the analyse_pwdb.m script using the command: analyse_pwdb(1) (where the 1 indicates that the data are stored in pwdb_1). This will produce several figures and tables in the folder .../pwdb_1/analysis/.
8. The figures and tables reported in the article describing the PWDB can be reproduced by following the instructions here.