WFDB Software Package 10.7.0
(87,148 bytes)
10.7.0 (10 June 2022):
The WFDB library now supports storing signals in compressed form, using
the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) algorithm. Compressed signal
files are designated by the the format code 508, 516, or 524 (depending
on the signal resolution.) In order to read and write signals in these
formats, the FLAC library and header files must be installed when
compiling the WFDB Software Package.
In calibration files, a signal may be listed as "*", which is a
"wildcard" entry that will match any signal description.
There is no longer a limit on the number of characters per line in a
header, calibration, or info file.
'wfdbdesc', 'wfdbmap', and 'heaxml' will correctly handle signal files
where the length cannot be determined.
When reading a multi-frequency record in low-resolution mode, sample
values are rounded to the nearest integer (rather than being truncated
towards zero.)
The WFDB library and applications can now handle multi-segment records
that are more than 2,147,483,647 sample intervals in length, even on
systems where a long integer is 32 bits.
In high-resolution mode, sampfreq() will return the highest sampling
frequency of any signal in the given record.
The osigfopen(), annopen(), setinfo(), and newcal() functions allow the
caller to detect I/O errors when writing an output file.
The getframe() function will handle skewed signals in variable-layout
records, skewed signals with multiple signal files, skewed signals with
signal file prologs, and multi-segment records with signal file
prologs. The wfdbgetskew() and wfdbsetiskew() functions will work
correctly.
URLs in the WFDB path may use colons to designate port numbers, IPv6
addresses, or passwords.
The sample() function will work when reading samples in random order.
The SALLOC(), SUALLOC(), SREALLOC(), and SSTRCPY() macros will check
for overflows and will avoid evaluating their arguments multiple times.
The Fortran wrapper functions in fortran/wfdbf.c will avoid buffer
overflows, and have improved support for native Fortran strings.
10.6.2 (8 March 2019):
Minor bugs have been fixed in the command-line option handling of
'gqfuse' and 'gqpost', so these programs will behave as documented.
Changes to the internal functions get_ann_table() and put_ann_table()
ensure sensible and consistent behavior if a custom annotation type is
defined (using setannstr()) but no description is provided (using
setanndesc()).
Changes in isgsettime() and isgsetframe() avoid incorrect behavior if
the specified time value is large enough to cause integer overflow.
It is now possible to run the package test suite without network
access, by setting the environment variable WFDB_NO_NET_CHECK to 1
before running 'make check'.
10.6.1 (28 November 2018):
'fir', 'mfilt', 'nst', 'snip', 'mit2wav', 'wfdb2mat', and 'xform' have
been updated to work correctly with multi-frequency input records.
(With the exception of xform in '-M' mode, these applications always
produce uniform-frequency output; in the case of multi-frequency input,
all signals will be resampled to either the highest or lowest sampling
frequency.)
'gqrs', 'sqrs', 'sqrs125', 'stepdet', and 'wabp', when invoked in
high-resolution mode, will now write an annotation time resolution
comment, so that other applications can correctly interpret their
output. 'nguess', 'gqfuse', and 'gqpost' will correctly handle
high-resolution input annotations, and produce high-resolution output
annotations in that case.
'rdann' will correctly display the elapsed or absolute time for
annotations in an EDF record. This worked correctly in versions
10.5.24 and earlier, but in version 10.6.0, the time values displayed
were incorrect.
The WFDB library will correctly handle HTTP redirection responses. The
library has also been optimized in various ways to reduce the amount of
unnecessary network traffic.
The internal function edfparse() will correctly calculate the ADC
resolution (digital sample range) of EDF signals, and will correctly
interpret EDF files that have an "unknown number of data records".
Numerous bugs have been corrected in the library functions isigopen(),
getframe(), and isgsettime(), which could cause applications to crash
or produce incorrect results when reading an incorrectly-formatted
record, or a record where some files are missing.
sample() now returns WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE if the requested sample is not
in the buffer and cannot be read. In previous versions of the library,
sample() would call exit(), forcing the program to exit immediately.
On Mac OS X, multi-architecture binaries are no longer produced by
default. They can be enabled, if desired, by passing the argument
'--enable-arch=i386,x86_64' to configure.
10.6.0 (26 January 2018):
A wide variety of bugs have been fixed in the WFDB library, and several
new features have been added. See the WFDB Programmer's Guide for
details. In particular, the library returns more accurate results when
reading a multi-segment record or an EDF file; many WFDB applications
may produce different output as a result.
The WFDB library now supports reading variable-layout, multi-frequency
records, provided that each signal's sampling frequency is constant
across the entire record.
'sortann' and 'mrgann' preserve the original time resolution of their
input files, and 'rdann' displays the elapsed time with higher
precision, if possible.
'wfdb2mat' uses the "version 5" format instead of "version 4". It
displays the correct instructions for computing physical values, in the
case of an 8-bit data file.
'mrgann' correctly interprets the argument to the first '-mX' option, if
any.
'xform' correctly computes the lower limit of the output ADC range.
This will result in different output if the '-c' option is used and the
signals are clipped.
'psfd' and 'pschart' correctly handle custom annotation mnemonics that
include parentheses or backslashes.
WAVE sets the X resource 'OpenWindows.SelectDisplaysMenu' to 'true' by
default, so that the left mouse button will do what users normally
expect it to do. If you prefer the traditional XView behavior, you can
set this to 'false' in your .Xdefaults or .Xresources.
WAVE permits viewing records at finer time scales, up to 500 mm/ms.
In some circumstances, when jumping to the beginning of a record in
WAVE, the signals would mysteriously disappear. This was most apparent
with very short records; it has now been fixed.
Some systems (particulary those based on systemd) allow programs to open
a larger range of file descriptors than what the C select() function
accepts. This causes older versions of the XView library to crash.
WAVE now works around this bug.
Changes in 'configure' and the various '.def' files make it simpler to
cross-compile WFDB using the GNU toolchain. Further improvements to the
makefiles permit parallel compilation (when using the -j option of GNU
make) and permit installation into a temporary staging directory (using
the DESTDIR variable.)
The 'install-wave32' script has been updated to work on current versions
of Fedora and Scientific Linux.
Now that all of PhysioNet is accessible using secure HTTPS, the
'pnwlogin' script has been updated to use HTTPS for all remote file
access (PhysioBank as well as PhysioNetWorks.)
10.5.24 (28 May 2015):
A security flaw was found in the 'pnwlogin' script used to access
PhysioNetWorks projects, owing to a combination of bugs in WFDB and
libcurl. Previous versions of the WFDB library would unconditionally
set the username and password for every HTTP or HTTPS request, which
caused them to be sent over the network unencrypted. This bug has now
been fixed; note, however, that the old version of 'pnwlogin' is now
blocked at the server side, and the new version of 'pnwlogin' is (by
design) incompatible with older, insecure versions of the WFDB library.
In order to use 'pnwlogin', be sure that you are using the latest
version of the library (both 32-bit and 64-bit, if necessary.)
On most platforms, the WFDB library will now be installed in
/usr/local/lib by default, or /usr/local/lib32 if you are building a
32-bit library on an x86_64 system. You can specify the --libdir option
to 'configure' to change the installation directory if you wish.
The 'wfdb-config' program used by external packages to compile and link
programs with the WFDB library was broken in version 10.5.23, in that if
libcurl was used, it would output the string "`curl-config --libs`",
rather than actually invoking curl-config. This has now been fixed for
the case of a static WFDB library. In the case of a dynamic WFDB
library, the curl flags were unnecessary in the first place, so they are
now omitted.
On MinGW, error messages will now be printed to standard error, rather
than being displayed in a popup message box.
When using libcurl, the environment variable CURL_CA_BUNDLE can be set
to the name of a file containing the trusted root certificate
authorities. (Note that this does not currently work with the 'winssl'
version of libcurl, which uses the system certificate database instead.)
If the environment variable WFDB_NET_DEBUG is set, detailed information
about HTTP transfers will be printed to standard error.
10.5.23 (13 March 2014):
Changes in 'configure', 'Makefile.tpl', 'conf/linux.def', and
'conf/linux-slib.def' simplify installation of shared WFDB libraries
and the applications that use them on Linux platforms.
Two new applications are included in this release. 'stepdet'
(app/stepdet.c), detects and annotates transitions in (possibly noisy)
two-level signals. 'parsescp' (convert/parsescp.c) converts some types
of SCP-ECG files to PhysioNet-compatible format.
The parser in 'wrsamp' has been rewritten in this release to accept a
wider range of non-standard CSV input formats.
The application that converts PhysioBank-compatible records to EDF
files, 'convert/mit2edf', did not properly calculate the range of
signals if the ADC resolution was specified to be 0 in the input .hea
file. In this release, 'mit2edf' guesses the ADC resolution based on
the storage format if necessary, allowing it to produce correct EDF
output given this type of incorrect input in most cases.
Another application, 'parsescp', has been added to the set of data
importers in 'convert/'.
Luca Citi contributed a bug fix and a new feature to 'convert/rdedfann'.
Previous versions did not properly handle input in which the last
annotation in a frame ends with a \024 byte in an even position. The
new '-x' option causes the input EDF+ annotation text to be copied to
the 'aux' position in the output, rather than the 'anntyp' position
(the default).
10.5.22 (8 December 2013):
'snip' has a new '-O' option to select the output format, and the '-l'
option to specify the duration now works properly.
wfdb2mat (convert/wfdb2mat.c) now ensures that all output signals have
non-empty units strings (previous versions did not check for this
possibility when the input was an EDF or EDF+ file).
10.5.21 (21 November 2013):
This release is the first to pass all tests performed by 'make check'
when compiled on MS-Windows using MinGW. Changes in 'configure',
'conf/mingw.def', 'conf/mingw-slib.def', 'lib/wfdbio.c',
'app/ecgeval.c', 'app/psfd.c', 'checkpkg/appcheck', and several of the
test output references in 'checkpkg/expected/', as well as a new script
('checkpkg/dosify'), made this possible.
In previous releases, WFDB library function strtim() did not always
handle bracketed string inputs properly. Thanks to Benjamin Moody,
who reported the problem and provided a patch to fix it. Prompted
by this fix, the deprecated atoi(), atof(), and atol() functions
have been replaced throughout the WFDB library by strtol() and
strtod().
rdedfann (convert/rdedfann.c) now accepts a -F option to specify
the implied sampling frequency for the output it generates
from input that contains EDF annotations only.
WAVE no longer fails when started with the option -VS 2 (to display
valid signals only). Thanks to Benjamin Moody for reporting the
misbehavior and providing a patch. Benjamin also provided a working
set of instructions for compiling WAVE as a 32-bit application on
64-bit Debian Wheezy or Ubuntu 12.04; see 'install-wave32'.
10.5.20 (2 September 2013):
Absolute pathnames are not tested in wfdb_open() unless the WFDB
path contains an empty component.
10.5.19 (21 July 2013):
This release includes fixes in lib/signal.c for several bugs that
sometimes caused findsig(), getvec(), and sample() to return incorrect
values when reading variable-layout multi-segment records with missing
signals.
10.5.18 (16 February 2013):
wfdb_addtopath() now works properly if the path contained only one
component on entry.
10.5.17 (2 January 2013):
A small change in the 'configure' script works around a problem
in building WFDB applications on recent versions of Debian and
Ubuntu GNU/Linux. The solution was first described in conf/linux.def
(version 10.3.17, August 2005, and in all later versions) but it was
not implemented by default since it was not needed at the time, and
because it complicated the process of building 32-bit applications on
64-bit platforms.
In previous releases, wfdb2mat did not correctly report the time of the
beginning of its output unless the conversion started at the beginning
of its input. This problem has been fixed in this release; thanks to
Mayela Zamora for reporting the problem.
The WFDB library internal function wfdb_addtopath() (in lib/wfdbio.c)
adds the path component of its string argument (i.e., everything except
the file name itself) to the WFDB path, inserting it there if it is not
already in the path. This function is called by another WFDB library
internal function, wfdb_open(), which finds and opens files for all
other WFDB library functions that open files; wfdb_open() passes the
paths of files it successfully opens to wfdb_addtopath(), permitting
other files in the same locations to be found. In previous releases,
wfdb_addtopath() appended the new path component to the end of the WFDB
path. As originally noted by David Brooks, this is suboptimal since
the files comprising a given record are most often kept in the same
directory. In this release, the new component is inserted at the head
of the path, or as the second path component if "." (the current
directory) is the first component, thus improving the likelihood that
subsequent files to be opened will be found in the first or second
location wfdb_open() checks.
10.5.16 (27 September 2012):
A bug in WFDB library versions 10.5.13 through 10.5.15 resulted in
an attempt to close an already-closed header file after invoking
putinfo(). Thanks to Benjamin Moody for identifying the bug and
contributing code to correct it (in lib/signal.c and lib/wfdbinit.c).
10.5.15 (25 September 2012):
A new application (app/gqfuse.c) for combining two or more beat
annotation files is included in this release.
Changes to the internal function readheader() in WFDB library version
10.5.14 made the library unable to open EDF files. This bug has been
fixed.
10.5.14 (13 August 2012):
WFDB applications can now read shared and private PhysioNetWorks
projects securely, just as they have been able to read PhysioBank
data since version 10.0.1 (November 1999). A new shell script
(app/pnwlogin) simplifies access to PhysioNetWorks projects. Low-level
functions wfdb_open (in lib/wfdbio.c) and readheader (in lib/signal.c)
incorporate changes to implement this new capability, as well as
another new feature that allows record names to be specified using
absolute pathnames or URLs. As always, a final '.hea' is not
considered to be part of a record name, but it may be included or
omitted as desired.
WFDB library function wfdbquit() no longer frees resources allocated
by libcurl or libwww, in order to avoid doing so more than once in
programs that use wfdbquit() to reset state before opening a new record.
Updates to app/sampfreq, app/sumann, and convert/ahaecg2mit provide
new features. See the WFDB Applications Guide for details.
10.5.13 (13 May 2012):
A flexible high-sensitivity QRS detector for research (app/gqrs.c), and
a companion post-processor (app/gqpost.c) for improving its positive
predictivity with minimal loss of sensitivity, are included in this
release. The algorithms employed in these applications are previously
unpublished.
Versions of the WFDB library up to 10.5.10 ignored embedded empty lines
within the 'info' sections of '.hea' files, but versions 10.5.10 and
10.5.11 treat them as markers of the end of the 'info' section. This
version restores the previous treatment of embedded empty lines. Thanks
to Justin Leo Cheang Loong for reporting this issue.
10.5.12 (24 April 2012):
When called with a NULL argument, getinfo() sometimes behaves
differently in WFDB library version 10.5.11 than it does in previous
versions. This release restores the previous behavior. Thanks to
Benjamin Moody for reporting this issue.
10.5.11 (6 April 2012):
This release of the WFDB library introduces support for '.info' files.
These are files containing 'info' strings in the same format as those
that can be stored in '.hea' files. The '.info' file for a record
named 'record' is named 'record.info', and it may be located anywhere
in the WFDB path. Function getinfo(), as in previous releases, returns
the first info string belonging to the record named as its argument, or
the next info string belonging to the previously specified record if
its argument is NULL. Beginning with this release, successive calls to
getinfo() return the next info string contained in the record's '.info'
file if it exists, and if there are no more in the record's '.hea'
file. Function putinfo() writes an info string to the currently open
output '.hea' file, unless function setinfo() (new in this release) has
been invoked, in which case the info string is appended to the record's
'.info' file in the current directory. getinfo() reads all of the
record's info strings the first time it is invoked, returning them one
at a time; wfdb_freeinfo() frees the memory allocated for getinfo()'s
info strings and closes the '.info' file opened by putinfo(), if any.
After invoking wfdb_freeinfo(), a subsequent call to getinfo() reads
the info strings again (or those of a different record, if a new record
has been opened).
A new application, app/hrstats.c, collects and summarizes heart rate
statistics based on the contents of an annotation file.
Virginia Faro-Maza identified and corrected a bug in WFDB library
function iannsettime() (in lib/annot.c) that caused some annotations
to be missed when two or more annotation files are open simultaneously.
WFDB library function isigopen(), in lib/signal.c, was reverted to that
of version 10.5.9.
Benjamin Moody contributed patches for app/snip.c to ensure that the
output will be written using a format that can accommodate the sample
range.
The signal calibration file, data/wfdbcal, has been updated with
new definitions.
10.5.10 (15 November 2011):
The WFDB library function isigopen(), in lib/signal.c, searches each
component of the WFDB path for the signal file(s) named in the
associated header file, until a match is found. Since signal files are
usually located in the same directories as header files, they can be
located most quickly by looking first in those directories. Thanks to
David Brooks for suggesting this optimization and for a sample
implementation.
Attempts to set the default size for HTTP range requests (using the
environment variable WFDB_PAGESIZE) were ignored in previous versions
of the WFDB library when compiled with libcurl. Thanks again to David
for noting this limitation, which has been eliminated in this release
by a change in www_init() (in lib/wfdbio.c).
'wfdbmap', which has been available in its own directory since release
10.5.6, is a now a standard application (app/wfdbmap.c). 'wfdbmap' is
used by the PhysioBank ATM to produce compact synoptic maps of WFDB-
compatible records. Previous versions of 'wfdbmap' were unable to map
multi-segment records unless all segment headers were local; this
limitation has been removed in this release.
This release also includes 'wfdbsignals' (app/wfdbsignals.c), used by
the PhysioBank ATM to list the signals in a WFDB record. 'wfdbsignals'
is a stripped-down version of 'wfdbdesc'.
10.5.9 (10 September 2011):
When an application passes an array containing WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE
values to putvec(), the function translates these into the
corresponding invalid-sample sentinel values used by the file format.
(This is the inverse of the transformation done by getvec() and
getframe(), so the effect is that at the application level, invalid
samples are always represented by the value WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE.)
Previous versions of the library did not perform this transformation
correctly for formats 80 and 160 (they used a value of zero rather than
-128 or -32768, respectively.) This bug was mainly an issue for
programs such as 'snip' and 'xform' that read and modify existing data
files.
In multi-segment mode, 'snip' will attempt to copy the segment
structure of the input record. In older versions, this was done by
parsing the master and layout headers by hand; this version uses the
library function getseginfo() instead, which should be more robust.
This version also fixes a bug that would cause snip to crash or produce
garbage output if asked to read past the end of a multi-segment record.
Thanks to Benjamin Moody for identifying these problems and providing
patches to remedy them.
10.5.8 (11 March 2011):
Previous versions of the WFDB library did not behave properly if
setbasetime() was invoked before setsampfreq(). Also, when dealing
with time-of-day strings, previous versions of mstimstr() and strtim()
round the base time to a number of samples since midnight, and do not
work correctly if the number of samples per day is not an integer.
Benjamin Moody contributed patches to lib/signal.c that remedy these
deficiencies. The patches include three new internal functions
(fstrtim(), ftimstr(), and fmstimstr()) which are equivalent to the
WFDB library functions strtim(), timstr(), and mstimstr(), but take a
second argument specifying the sampling frequency. These internal
functions are used by setbasetime() and setheader() to record the base
time with millisecond precision, independent of the actual sampling
frequency, and independent of the effects of setifreq(), if any.
Moreover, mstimstr() returns a string representation of the base time
plus the given number of sampling intervals, mstimstr(0) returns the
exact base time, and strtim() returns the sample number that is closest
to the given time. In addition to being more precise, both functions
now work correctly even if the number of samples per day is not an
integer. Applications using this version of the WFDB library may call
setbasetime() and setsampfreq() in either order.
'configure' now detects XView (if installed) on Ubuntu, so that 'wave'
can be built automatically by 'make install' on 32-bit Ubuntu.
10.5.7 (12 December 2010):
When opening records with the same name in different directories
successively within a single process, the persistence of WFDB path
changes made by WFDB library function wfdb_addtopath interfered with
locating the correct files in the second and subsequent records.
The solution included addition of a new WFDB library function,
resetwfdb, which restores the WFDB path to the value returned by
the first invocation of getwfdb in the current process (or NULL if
getwfdb has not been invoked); library function wfdbquit now invokes
resetwfdb. In addition, the safe-string copy macro SSTRCPY (defined
in wfdb.h) now properly handles the case of copying null pointers.
Thanks to Benjamin Moody for identifying the problem, providing test
inputs, and contributions to the solution.
The -H option of app/sampfreq.c did not work in recent releases because
of changes in the WFDB library; it works again in 10.5.7.
10.5.6 (29 November 2010):
WFDB records with names of the form 'nnn/nnn' can now be identified
using the short form 'nnn/' in applications built using the WFDB library
(e.g., 'rdsamp -r mimicdb/037/' and 'rdsamp -r mimicdb/037/037' are now
equivalent).
In <wfdb.h>, the maximum lengths of record names, units strings, and
signal description ('.desc') strings have been increased (to 50, 50,
and 100 characters respectively). In lib/wfdbio.c, the maximum length
of a WFDB file name (including path information) has been increased to
1024 characters.
When given an input record with a name containing path information,
previous versions of wfdb2mat preserved the path information in the
output '.hea' file, which made it difficult to use (although the '.mat'
output file was not affected). The current version strips the unneeded
path information.
The previous version of wrsamp did not work if signal numbers were
specified, and the input did not include column headers. Thanks to
Jesus Maria Rodriguez Presedo for reporting this problem. Also,
the previous version of wrsamp did not copy initial samples represented
in E notation (e.g. 1.23e+02). Both of these bugs are corrected in
this release.
If signals with a non-zero baseline were scaled using previous versions
of xform, baseline shifts were possible in the output. This problem
has been corrected in this release.
This release includes wfdbmap, an application that can be used
together with other open-source software to create synoptic maps of
WFDB-compatible records, in the format of those presented by the
PhysioBank ATM. 'wfdbmap' is not compiled by default; see
wfdbmap/README for additional information.
10.5.5 (6 October 2010):
WFDB-compatible signals can now be converted to a simple XML format
using rdsamp's new '-X' option, and XML files in this format can be
converted to WFDB-compatible format using wrsamp (which recognizes
this format automatically, requiring no special option). A document
type description of this format, and of XML formats for annotation
and header files, is available at
http://physionet.org/physiobank/database/XML/wfdb.dtd
This file, together with a set of applications (annxml, heaxml, xmlann,
and xmlhea) that convert WFDB-compatible annotation and header files
to and from these XML formats, are included in the 'xml' subdirectory
of this package.
Since version 10.4.14, app/sortann has not properly sorted annotations
containing non-zero 'chan' or 'num' fields. This bug has now been
fixed; thanks to Jesus Maria Rodriguez Presedo for reporting it and
for providing a test case.
Changes in conf/darwin.def and conf/darwin-slib.def allow creation
of multi-architecture (i386, x86_64, and ppc) binaries on Mac OS X.
Virginia Faro-Maza pointed out that sumstats did not derive aggregate
shutdown statistics described in ANSI/AAMI EC57, and that bxb did not
preserve the raw data needed to derive these statistics. Both bxb.c
and sumstats.c have been revised in this release to remedy these
omissions.
An uninitialized flag may have made ahaecg2mit behave as if its -s
option was always given, and an informational message contained
a formatting error; both problems have been corrected, thanks to
a report from Isaac Henry.
Errors in the formatting of a variety of error and warning messages
have been corrected in app/ecgeval.c, app/psfd.c, app/rdsamp.c,
app/snip.c, app/sumstats.c, app/wrann.c, convert/mit2edf.c,
convert/mit2wav.c, convert/wfdb2mat.c, and psd/lomb.c.
10.5.4 (13 July 2010):
Function getseginfo() has been introduced in WFDB library version
10.5.4, to allow applications to obtain information about the
segments belonging to the current (multi-segment) input record.
In previous versions, integer arithmetic overflow was possible when
converting format 32 samples using aduphys(), if the difference between
the baseline value and the sample to be converted exceeded the range of
signed 32-bit integers. Although rdsamp does not use aduphys(),
similar code in rdsamp also exhibited this problem, which has now
been corrected; thanks to Ikaro Silva for reporting it and providing a
test case.
A wrsamp bug introduced in version 10.4.25 caused it to fail in
some cases if no columns were specified. This has been corrected;
thanks to Tony Cacere for reporting this problem together with a
test case.
WAVE version 6.11, included in this release of the WFDB software
package, allows the user to change display scales using keyboard
commands. This allows one to resize signals independently, a frequently
requested feature. For details, see "How can I enlarge or reduce the
size of individual signals?" in the WAVE FAQ (in WAVE, click on Help
and select "Frequently asked questions").
10.5.3 (22 June 2010):
Function getgvmode() has been introduced in WFDB library version
10.5.3, to allow querying the current operating mode of getvec().
A local variable (_L in lib/signal.c, introduced in 10.5.0) had
a name collision on Solaris with a predefined constant, so it has
been renamed as _lw. A comment in each of the *.def files in conf,
now corrected, erroneously referred to LN, rather than LL.
Tony Ricke reported that test builds (./configure; make) of recent
versions of the WFDB package fail on Cygwin. This problem has been
corrected (in conf/cygwin-slib.def) in 10.5.3.
Tony also pointed out that current versions of the EC38 and EC57
standards no longer exclude episodes of atrial flutter from
evaluations of the positive predictivity of an atrial fibrillation
detector, as in previous versions of EC38. The WFDB application
epicmp has been revised accordingly, so that atrial flutter episodes
are included in these evaluations unless the -x option is given
(to conform with EC38:1998 and earlier).
10.5.2 (18 April 2010):
When reading annotations of multifrequency records opened in
high-resolution mode, a time shift was introduced by getann() in
WFDB library versions 10.4.5 to 10.5.1. This problem has been
corrected in 10.5.2.
Certain malformed segment .hea files were able to cause null pointer
errors in WFDB library function isigopen. This problem has been
corrected. Thanks to Mauro Villarroel for reporting this problem
together with a test case.
The -s option of WFDB applications sqrs, sqrs125, wqrs, and wabp now
works properly. A bug common to all four applications was introduced
in 10.4.12; thanks to Andras Hartmann for reporting it.
WFDB application epicmp did not always match each reference measurement
with the test measurement that was nearest in time, in previous
versions. The effect of this error in normal use (smoothed measurements
recorded in each test beat annotation) would have been very small.
Thanks to Liu Man for reporting this problem and suggesting a solution.
WFDB application xform produced incorrect output when a gain change was
required and the -M option was used. This error has been corrected;
thanks to Joe Mietus for providing a test case that led to discovery of
the problem.
10.5.1 (19 March 2010):
In version 10.5.0, signals in formats 80 and 160 with amplitudes of 0
were incorrectly treated as invalid by getframe() and getvec(). Thanks
to Isaac Henry for reporting this problem, which has been corrected in
signal.c.
10.5.0 (16 March 2010):
The WFDB library now supports signals with 24 and 32 bits of precision,
using new formats 24 and 32, and WFDB applications 'wrsamp' and 'xform'
support user selection of 24- and 32-bit formats for output signal
files. 'wfdb2mat' automatically selects 32-bit .mat format when
exporting records that include format 24 or 32 signals. WFDB
applications can now read BDF and BDF+ files (24-bit EDF and EDF+
variants).
Note that these formats, unlike all previously supported formats,
require more than 16 bits per sample value. If the WFDB software is
compiled on a 16-bit platform (unusual except for embedded processors),
the excess high bits of signals in these formats are not read on input,
and they are replaced by zeroes on output, unless the WFDB_Sample data
type has been redefined as 'long' (in wfdb.h). This is not done by
default since it would increase memory and computational requirements
unnecessarily in embedded applications that do not require 24- or
32-bit precision.
Since support for extended precision samples cannot be introduced
without this limitation in backward compatibility for 16-bit platforms,
the minor version number of the WFDB library has been incremented to 5.
Most users will not be affected by this change, however, apart from the
new functionality it provides.
Memory allocation macros that have been defined previously in wfdblib.h
have been moved to wfdb.h so they are accessible to WFDB applications,
including user-written applications. See the WFDB Programmer's Guide
for information about using these macros (MEMERR, SFREE, SUALLOC,
SALLOC, SREALLOC, and SSTRCPY).
A buffer overflow in the WFDB library's internal function edfparse()
(in lib/signal.c) has been corrected, thanks to a bug report and patch
from Joonas Paalasmaa.
In previous versions of 'rdsamp', the '-pe' and '-Pe' options did not
force output of elapsed times if the selected record had a defined
starting time. These options now work correctly in such cases.
Some combinations of options caused the version of 'wrsamp' included
in version 10.4.25 to fail; this has now been corrected.
WAVE's Find window now provides a means to search for the next valid
sample of a specified signal.
10.4.25 (21 January 2010):
WFDB application 'rdsamp' can now write CSV (comma-separated value)
format output using its new '-c' option, and 'wrsamp' can read CSV
format input. If no input columns are specified, 'wrsamp' converts
all of them. If the input contains signal names, units, or timestamps,
'wrsamp' saves them in the header file it creates. 'wrsamp' also has
two new options ('-O', to select the output format, and '-z', to
suppress output of column 0).
WFDB application 'sigamp' has new options for printing individual
measurements.
The script 'install-wave32', used to build and install a 32-bit version
of WAVE on some 64-bit platforms, has been updated so that it can be
used on Fedora 12 (as well as on previously supported platforms).
In WFDB library versions 10.4.5 through 10.4.24, strtim("e") did not
work properly when the open input record was an EDF file and high
resolution input mode had not been selected. This problem has been
corrected.
10.4.24 (28 October 2009):
A possible string overflow in nst.c has been corrected. Thanks to
Virginia Faro-Maza for finding and reporting this problem.
Recent versions of the Xorg (X11 Window System) server freeze when
applications that use XView (such as WAVE) 'grab' the mouse pointer.
Thanks to Michael Buro, who supplied a run-time workaround for this
problem that can be used with any XView application to disable pointer
grabs. Pointer grabs are now permanently disabled in WAVE.
10.4.23 (7 August 2009):
Several changes in lib/signal.c eliminate unintended interactions that
occurred in previous versions between the input modes that can be
selected using setgvmode(). The effects of these interactions were
first observed in newly written code; existing WFDB applications were
apparently unaffected.
On Cygwin/Windows, the WFDB library is now installed in both /usr/bin
and /usr/lib, to simplify building user applications that use the WFDB
library and to simplify running compiled WFDB applications outside of
the Cygwin environment.
In some cases, previous versions of WFDB application 'rxr' entered
an infinite loop and did not produce any output if one of the annotation
files being compared ended during an episode of atrial fibrillation.
Thanks to Mathias Gruber, who reported the problem and provided a test
case that made it possible to find and fix this bug.
WFDB application 'wrann' now handles input files containing annotation
mnemonics that it does not recognize by writing the corresponding
annotations as comment annotations, with the unrecognized mnemonics
inserted at the beginning of the 'aux' fields in the output annotations.
(Previous versions of 'wrann' discarded any such input annotations.)
WFDB application 'rdedfann' now preserves the full time resolution of
annotations it extracts from EDF+ input files, and it replaces any
whitespace in those annotations with underscores (_). Coupled with
the changes in wrann described above, it is now possible to use these
two applications to create a WFDB-compatible annotation file from the
annotations in an EDF+ file without manual intervention.
10.4.22 (28 July 2009):
When reading multifrequency records in WFDB_LOWRES mode, invalid
sample values occurring in signals that need to be decimated were
not always handled properly in WFDB library function getvec(),
resulting in spurious artifacts during intervals that contained a
mixture of valid and invalid samples. This bug has been corrected;
thanks to Omar Abdala for a report that brought this problem to light.
A declaration for WFDB library function findsig() has been added
to wfdb.h. Thanks to Thomas Heldt for reporting a warning
that resulted from its omission in previous versions.
Omar also found and corrected a bug in app/wabp.c that resulted in
premature termination of processing some variable-layout multisegment
records, and improved the autoselection of a default ABP signal.
An uninitialized variable in convert/mit2wav.c caused problems in
previous versions; thanks to Greg Downs for the bug report and fix.
WFDB application 'wrann' from the previous two versions truncated
'aux' strings containing embedded whitespace; this has been corrected.
Thanks to Mauro Villarroel for the bug report.
10.4.21 (14 May 2009):
Changes in lib/Makefile.tpl were needed in order to pass configuration
constants to the functions added to wfdbio.c in 10.4.20, but were
omitted from that release; they have been included in this version.
Several changes in WAVE, including an option (accessible from the View
panel) to display valid signals only, have been designed to provide
more convenient access to variable-layout records such as those in the
MIMIC II Waveform Database.
10.4.20 (4 May 2009):
WFDB application 'snip' can now create excerpts of multi-segment
records that preserve the segmentation of the original records.
WFDB application 'wrann' now determines output annotation times using
the first column of input, if the first column appears to contain
absolute times rather than elapsed times; otherwise, it uses the sample
numbers in the second column, as in previous versions.
WFDB application 'rdsamp' now handles long units strings more cleanly.
Several new functions have been added to lib/wfdbio.c, to make
configuration constants accessible at run time; these are needed
by the WFDB Toolkit for Matlab. wfdb-config.c has been rewritten to
use several of these functions, and has been moved from lib to app.
10.4.19 (26 March 2009):
pschart and psfd now handle signal names in their command-line argument
lists (following the '-s' option).
The version of wfdb2mat included in this release generates a .mat file
of the expected size even if the input ends prematurely. Thanks to
Weixiang Liu for a report that prompted this revision.
10.4.18 (15 March 2009):
The WFDB library no longer reports spurious checksum errors when reading
EDF files, which don't have checksums.
WFDB application wfdb2mat now correctly handles EDF input records, so
it is now possible to use it to convert EDF to .mat format directly.
10.4.17 (5 March 2009):
Internal WFDB library function wfdb_checkname() now allows hyphens
(-) within record and annotator names.
WFDB applications xform and wfdb2mat now properly handle variable-layout
multisegment input records.
10.4.16 (3 March 2009):
WFDB library function strtim() now rounds rather than truncating when
the sampling frequency is not an integer.
WFDB application wrann is now (slightly) less fussy about its input
and no longer requires the tab character preceding an aux string to
occur in a specific column as did earlier versions.
Bug fixes in convert/wfdb2mat.
10.4.15 (26 February 2009):
WFDB library function mstimstr() now outputs time to the nearest
millisecond, rather than truncating its calculation to the nearest
lower number of milliseconds.
A new WFDB library function, wfdbputprolog(), can write a prolog at the
beginning of a signal file. WFDB applications ignore embedded prologs.
A new WFDB application, convert/wfdb2mat, can convert all or part of
a WFDB-compatible signal file into a Matlab-compatible .mat file that
remains readable by WFDB applications.
10.4.14 (23 February 2009):
WFDB library function setwfdb() now exports the WFDB library
environment variables (WFDB, WFDBCAL, WFDBANNSORT, and WFDBGVMODE) on
all modern platforms, so that a process started by a WFDB application
inherits the WFDB environment of its parent. (This is not possible on
platforms that do not provide a working putenv() function, such as
MacOS 9 and earlier, and 16-bit versions of MS-Windows.) Some previous
versions also included this capability, but the older implementation
caused a memory leak, and it was disabled in version 10.4.6. Thanks to
Omar Abdala and Dan Scott for reporting the problem and help in
identifying its cause.
A new WFDB application, wfdbtime, is convenient for use in scripts to
convert among absolute and elapsed times and times in sample intervals.
10.4.13 (16 February 2009):
A new WFDB library function, tnextvec(), finds the next valid sample
from a chosen signal, occurring at or after a specified time. This
function is particularly useful when reading variable-layout
multi-segment records that may have lengthy gaps in signals of
interest.
For portability, the WFDB library has always stored parameters such as
sampling frequency and gain as strings rather than as floating-point
numbers. Although the resultant loss of precision has been almost
always negligible, it has been observable in the specific case of
converting very large time intervals from sample intervals to seconds,
when the sampling frequency in Hz cannot be represented exactly in
binary (e.g., if the sampling frequency is once per minute, or 1/60
Hz). This situation cannot be wholly avoided, but it can be minimized.
Changes in this release, in setheader() and in functions that record
time units in annotation files, increase the precision with which
non-integer parameters are recorded, so that loss of precision as a
result of converting them to and from strings should almost never be
observable.
Several options have been added to rdsamp, which can now print the
time of each sample in a variey of formats, and can use the new
tnextvec() function (see above) to search for valid samples of a
signal of interest.
10.4.12 (20 January 2009):
The rule for sorting annotations within a file has been changed to
allow a much larger number of simultaneous annotations (i.e.,
annotations in a given annotation file with identical 'time' fields)
than was previously possible. Since version 6.1, the WFDB library
sorts simultaneous annotations according to the value of their 'chan'
fields, allowing for 256 simultaneous annotations at any given time.
Beginning in version 10.4.12, the library sorts simultaneous
annotations according to their 'num' fields, then sorts those with
identical 'num' fields according to their 'chan' fields, allowing up to
65,536 simultaneous annotations at any given time.
A new WFDB library function, findsig(), returns the signal number
of the input signal matching its string argument, or -1 if no such
input signal exists. If the string argument could be interpreted
as an input signal number, it is taken as such; otherwise, the
string argument must be an exact match to a signal name ("desc"
field in the siginfo structure).
WFDB applications calsig, pschart, psfd, rdsamp, sqrs,
sqrs125, wabp, wqrs, and xform now accept signal names in any
context in which an input signal number can be given.
The install-wave32 script now installs 32-bit libgcc and Open Look
glyph fonts if they are missing, as by default in Fedora 10.
Previous versions of WFDB library function setifreq() entered an
infinite loop if invoked (contrary to specifications) before
opening an input record. setifreq() now detects the error, emits
an appropriate warning, and returns.
If a WFDB application that uses WFDB library version 10.4.5
through 10.4.11 attempted to read an annotation file before
reading the sampling frequency of the associated record (for
example, by invoking isigopen() or sampfreq()), the annotation
times might all appear to be zero. This may occur when
reading annotations created using WFDB 10.4.5 or later. The
times supplied when creating the file are correctly written
but may be incorrectly read in these cases. This problem was
corrected in this release; thanks to Thomas Heldt for
reporting it and providing a reproducible example of it.
10.4.11 (11 November 2008):
Build process improvements, especially on Cygwin and MinGW targets.
10.4.10 (31 October 2008):
EDF digital maximum and minimum values are now read properly in 64-bit
builds; previous versions had a bug in edfparse (an internal WFDB
library function defined in lib/signal.c) that did not appear in
32-bit builds. A similar bug was also corrected in convert/edf2mit.
Thanks to Joe Mietus for reporting the problem.
Using a block size that is not a power of 2 with the "-n" and "-N"
options of "fft" now works properly (although powers of 2 are still
recommended for best results). Thanks again to Joe Mietus for
reporting the problem and valuable assistance in correcting it.
The "-f" option now works properly in ann2rr (previous versions
worked only if "-t" was also provided).
10.4.9 (10 October 2008):
The "configure" script is now non-interactive by default. A new
"-i" option selects interactive mode.
The new "install-wave32" script simplifies installation of WAVE on
64-bit Linux.
The WFDB library once again correctly interprets a hyphen ('-')
(used in place of a record name, annotator name, signal file name,
or calibration file name) as a reference to the standard input or
output, for platforms that support POSIX standard I/O; see section
5.2, "Using Standard I/O for Database Files", in the WFDB Programmer's
Guide. This feature was broken in 10.4.5 as a side effect of changes
in wfdb_open (an internal WFDB library function defined in
lib/wfdbio.c).
10.4.8 (31 July 2008):
New application convert/ahaecg2mit.c converts files from the AHA DB
DVD into WFDB records. (ECRI, distributors of the AHA DB, recently
began shipping it on DVDs in a format incompatible with its previous
formats.)
Applications wrsamp and xform use rand() and srand() rather than the
POSIX rand48() and srand48() to generate dither (the POSIX functions
are not universally available).
10.4.7 (15 July 2008):
Yinqi Zhang reported and contributed a fix for a memory leak in
make_vsd() (an internal WFDB library function defined in signal.c).
Application nguess has new -m option that allows varying the
threshold for inserting inferred sinus beat labels in its output.
Applications wrsamp and xform can now add dithering to their
inputs using a new -d option.
10.4.6 (9 April 2008):
The WFDB functions setafreq() and getafreq() (for setting and getting
the time resolution of newly-created output annotation files in ticks
per second) were new in version 10.4.5, but were undocumented. They
are now described in the WFDB Programmer's Guide, and wrappers for
these functions are now included in fortran/wfdbf.c.
An important change in the WFDB library: memory allocation errors are
now treated as fatal by default (in previous versions, the functions
that encountered them returned error values that permitted the
application to handle them). These errors occur when there is
insufficient memory available to the WFDB library. To obtain the
old behavior, in which the calling function will continue execution
if possible after a memory allocation error, invoke wfdbmemerr(0).
By default, however, such an error will cause the process to terminate.
In either case, the WFDB library emits an appropriate error message to
aid in troubleshooting.
New macros for handling dynamically allocated memory are defined in
lib/wfdblib.h and used throughout the WFDB library, eliminating most
known memory leaks. Three known leaks remain (in setecgstr, setannstr,
and setanndesc); these are documented and harmless in current
applications. Thanks to Yinqi Zhang for reporting a leak in copysi()
(an internal WFDB library function defined in signal.c), which prompted
the cleanup.
WFDB functions strecg(), setecgstr(), strann(), setannstr(), and
setanndesc() now handle NULL string inputs properly. (Previous versions
passed NULL strings to strcmp(), with undesirable results.)
A pair of new utility applications, signame and signum, convert signal
numbers to signal names and vice versa.
A new format converter, rdedfann, is included in convert/. It extracts
annotations from EDF+ files and writes them to the standard output in
rdann output format. After changing the EDF+ annotation mnemonics
to WFDB mnemonics (using your favorite scripting language, such as
perl or sed), wrann can then write a WFDB-compatible annotation file
from the transformed text.
wrann now works when creating annotation files for EDF and other
multifrequency records. The incompatibility between rdann's -x
format and wrann has now been noted in the rdann and wrann man pages.
rxr did not account properly for runs that are not followed by at
least one beat annotation (common in the cudb). Shibu Kallidukkil
supplied an example that evoked this problem, which has now been
corrected.
10.4.5 (6 February 2008):
Bob Farrell and Tony Ricke chased down and provided fixes for memory
leaks in several WFDB library functions, and also provided revisions
to permit additional type checking and to avoid type mismatch warnings.
Alexander Khaustov reported a bug in convert/ad2m.c and provided a fix
for it. The bug caused ad2m to truncate its output prematurely if the
"-f" option had been used.
Changes in the build system make it easier to build WFDB using Cygwin
gcc (with or without the Cygwin POSIX library).
Handle missing samples properly in pschart.c and psfd.c.
Removed unused variables from app/wapb.c (thanks to Thomas Heldt).
Corrected threshold update in app/wqrs.c, and added a check to avoid
problems when the sampling frequency is too low.
When creating annotation files, if the input sampling frequency differs
from the frame rate of the input record (either because of using
WFDB_HIGHRES mode while reading a multifrequency record, or because
of having used setifreq() to modify the sampling frequency), a comment
is written to the beginning of the annotation file indicating the
resolution of the annotation times in ticks per second (thus allowing
the application to store its annotations with whatever time resolution
is desired). When reading an annotation file, if such a resolution
comment is found, getann adjusts the times of annotations to match the
currently defined sampling frequency. The resolutions are kept
independently for each annotation file, so (for example) bxb can
compare two annotation files written with different resolutions.
The ability to set the time resolution of annotation files has required
a minor change in the semantics of setifreq(). It is now necessary
to invoke setifreq() before creating an annotation file that will
have a resolution matching the (modified) input sampling frequency.
Since setifreq() must be invoked after opening the input signals,
this implies that wfdbinit() cannot be used to open both input signals
and output annotation files if setifreq() is to be used; rather, the
sequence should be isigopen(), setifreq(), and finally annopen().
If a string that includes a '.' is supplied to a WFDB library function
where a record name is expected, the WFDB library assumes that it is
the name of a file located in the WFDB path. If the name ends in '.hea',
the file is assumed to be a WFDB-format header file, and its record name
is assumed to be the first part of the string, exclusive of the '.hea'.
This version also includes support for reading EDF files natively.
If a string supplied as a record name contains a '.' but does not end
in '.hea', it is assumed to be the record name of an EDF file of the
same name.
10.4.4 (12 May 2006):
Added 'collect.sh' script to 'conf', and 'collect' target to
'make' template files (Makefile.tpl) to simplify creation of
binary tarballs and RPMs.
10.4.3 (10 May 2006):
Updated wfdb.spec (used to generate WFDB RPMs) to account for
applications with compiled-in paths.
10.4.2 (4 May 2006):
Mathias Gruber reported a line in wfdbio.c that used void pointer
arithmetic (permitted as an extension by gcc but not allowed by
ANSI/ISO C or most other C compilers). This operation has been
replaced by ANSI/ISO C-conformant code.
Column headings produced using rdann's -v option are now correct
even when the starting time, but not the starting date, has been
specified in the input record's .hea file.
Problems with compiled-in paths in several applications (wfdb-config,
wavescript, pschart, and psfd) occurred as a result of Makefile
bugs, which have now been fixed.
Many minor documentation updates.
10.4.1 (6 April 2006):
A bug caused incorrect output from WFDB library function strtim()
when called with the argument "i", following use of setifreq() to
change the effective sampling frequency, resulting in incorrect output
from example 10 in the WFDB Programmer's Guide. This has now been
corrected.
Matt Osborn reported a bug in convert/ad2m that prevented proper use
of the -f option when processing a compressed signal file. [This was
partially fixed in this version, but the fix introduced another bug,
which was corrected in version 10.4.5.]
10.4.0 (2 March 2006):
Version 10.4.0 and later versions of the WFDB library are intended to
be compiled using ANSI/ISO C (and C++) compilers only; previous
versions also supported the use of traditional (K&R) C compilers. The
most obvious change resulting from this decision is in the use of
prototypes in function declarations, an innovation of ANSI C that
permits better error-checking by compilers. The ANSI/ISO C standard is
now more than 15 years old, and it has been over 10 years since a C
compiler that does not support function prototypes was used for
development of the WFDB library. Code in wfdbio.c that provides
limited support for compilers that do not provide an ANSI/ISO C library
has been retained for now, and wfdb.h still includes a set of K&R C
function declarations; both of these features are deprecated, however,
and may be removed in future versions of the WFDB library. Users who
still need to use a K&R C compiler to compile the library itself may
find 'unprotoize' (included in the GNU gcc distribution) to be helpful.
The WFDB Fortran wrappers (fortran/wfdbf.c) have been revised for
compatibility with gcc 4.x (which no longer supports -fwritable-strings
as a way to convert between C and Fortran strings in place), and
for compatibility with the new (experimental) Fortran 9x compiler,
gfortran, which replaces g77 in gcc 4.x. The revised wrappers remain
compatible with g77 and with the even older f2c translator.
The symbol WFDB_GVPAD is newly defined in <wfdb/wfdb.h>. It may be
added to WFDB_HIGHRES or WFDB_LOWRES and given as input to setgvmode().
The effect of doing so is that missing samples, and samples recognized
as invalid, are replaced by getframe (getvec) with the most recently
read valid values rather than by the special value WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE.
This behavior allows applications such as digital filters to remain
ignorant of missing data without significant performance penalties.
The mapping of lowest expressible sample values to WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE
performed by getframe (in lib/signal.c) did not work properly for
signal formats 80 and 160 (in which samples are recorded as unsigned
integers); this has now been corrected.
The WFDB function 'sample()' now checks that its signal number input
is valid, and returns WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE if not.
WFDB applications nst and xform have been revised so that they
correctly handle input that may contain invalid samples. Programs
revised to use WFDB_GVPAD mode are fir, mfilt, sigamp, sqrs, sqrs125,
wabp, and wqrs; all of these now also accept a '-H' option to read
multifrequency records in high-resolution mode.
Peter Domitrovich contributed an integration routine to memse to
calculate power in bands of interest for HRV analysis.
Example 7 in the WFDB Programmer's Guide now works properly. The
previous version always began processing the input at sample 0,
regardless of start time specified in its argument list.
The WFDB Applications Guide now documents the format of variable-
layout records (in header.5).
WAVE now handles the case of running on an X server that does not
implement backing store more reliably. The code that was introduced
in 10.3.16 did not behave properly with some X servers and window
managers; the latest version avoids this behavior.
An installation bug caused WAVE not to read its default X11 resource
file from the standard location in some cases. The most visible
effect was that the signal window background would appear grey
rather than white. This bug has been fixed.
Hardware recommendations for WAVE have been updated in the WAVE
User's Guide.
10.3.17 (20 August 2005):
The WFDB library now supports reading variable-layout records
(multi-segment records in which the number, arrangement, gains,
and baselines of the signals may vary from one segment to the next;
see 'Multi-Segment Records' in the WFDB Programmer's Guide).
Rounding errors in the WFDB library's mstimstr function have been
reduced. Previous versions did not always round appropriately when
the sampling frequency was much less than 1 Hz.
The maximum length for a record name (WFDB_MAXRNL, defined in wfdb.h)
has been increased from 11 to 20.
A new constant, WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE, is now defined in wfdb.h. It
is used to identify padding inserted to fill in for missing data.
When writing in any format that uses fewer than 16 bits per sample,
putvec maps WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE to the lowest (most negative) value
expressible in that format; when reading a signal file in such a
format, getframe performs the inverse mapping, so that missing data
can be identified regardless of the data format.
A side effect of this change is that (for example) any samples that
had the most negative value (for example, -2048 in a format 212 signal
file) are now flagged as invalid. To treat such samples as invalid
is reasonable, however, since these occur only when the input level
falls below the working range of the analog-to-digital converter.
'pschart', 'psfd', and 'wave' recognize this value, skip over missing
data, and determine the position of each trace using the valid data
only. 'rdsamp' also recognizes this value when using its '-p' option,
indicating missing values as '-', and 'wrsamp' interprets a '-' token
in its input as a missing value indicator to be written in its output
as a sample with the value WFDB_INVALID_SAMPLE. 'xform' also
recognizes and preserves this value in its output.
'pschart' and 'psfd' process signal lists more cleanly (each '-s'
option resets the signal list); grid lines and other narrow lines
are now 0.2 mm wide by default (earlier versions drew "zero width"
lines that can be nearly invisible on modern high-resolution printers).
An error in the psfd man page (doc/wag-src/psfd.1) has been corrected.
'sumstats' now accepts certain valid inputs that previous versions
rejected.
A bug affecting signal highlighting in 'wave' was introduced in
10.3.16, and has now been corrected.
wave/soelim.c now works on the x86_64 architecture.
The 'configure' script and the .def files in 'conf' have been
revised, with several new options added to 'configure' (-m32,
--without-netfiles, --withlibcurl, and --with-libwww. 'make all'
(or simply 'make') builds and checks a complete test installation
of the WFDB Software Package without affecting any previously installed
version of the package (until now, 'make' has installed the WFDB
library and its associated *.h files). The 'configure' script now
automatically detects the x86_64 (AMD64) architecture under GNU/Linux,
and sets up the Makefiles appropriately (unless the '-m32' option
is used to force 32-bit mode).
10.3.16 (13 June 2005):
Benjamin Moody has added an interface between the WFDB library and
libcurl as an alternative to the existing libwww interface, and has
updated 'configure' and conf/*.def to search for and use libcurl if
it is available. The primary advantages of libcurl over libwww are
that libcurl is smaller and faster, it supports access to
password-protected files, and it is actively maintained. Both
libraries are freely available on all popular platforms.
Isaac Henry has provided changes to WAVE that improve the behavior of
the signal window if the X server does not provide backing store.
Isaac has also updated 'configure' to support building a native
MS-Windows version of the WFDB library using either Cygwin gcc or MinGW
gcc.
In wabp and wqrs, the variable 'signal' has been renamed (to 'sig')
to avoid redefining a symbol appearing in signal.h under Mac OS X 10.4
(thanks to Richard Piper for reporting this problem).
A number of minor changes, mostly involving conditional use of
malloc.h, stdlib.h, and string.h, were made to eliminate warnings
from gcc 4.x.
A small number of files that are no longer supported, including several
MS-DOS utilities and makefiles, have been removed from this version of
the WFDB Software Package.
10.3.15 (31 January 2005):
Rules for generating the binary tarball for MS-Windows have been
fixed so that the Cygwin DLLs are now included with correct
permissions.
Installation of shared libraries under GNU/Linux requires an extra
step if SELinux is enabled (as under Fedora Core 2 and later); this
has been incorporated into conf/linux-slib.def.
10.3.14 (29 December 2004):
Use rdann's new -v option to add column headings to its standard
output.
A gain dependency in wqrs has been removed. As a result, wqrs
now works better on low-resolution input than previous versions.
The change results in occasional shifts of one sampling interval
in the placement of annotations for typical (higher resolution)
records, relative to previous versions.
The 'make' rules for creating a binary tarball have been improved,
and when making one on the Cygwin platform, the Cygwin DLLs are now
included automatically.
Guido Muesch reported that the WFDB library function getspf() did
not always return correct results if the frame frequency does not
have an exact representation as a double precision floating point
number. This problem has now been corrected.
To simplify installation of the WFDB software package, wfdb-config
has been moved from app to lib.
Carlos AS Felgueiras provided a patch to correct several problems
related to compiling the WFDB software package and building the
WFDB rpms.
10.3.13 (5 May 2004):
Using an indirect WFDB path (i.e., setting the WFDB environment
variable to a value such as '@FILE', where FILE contains the
desired path) was broken in WFDB library versions 10.3.9 through
10.3.12; it now works again, thanks to a patch contributed by
Fred Geheb. Fred also found and proposed a solution to a memory
leak in pschart (also in psfd), which has now been fixed.
A bug in xform caused incorrect output when processing multifrequency
records in high-resolution mode (using xform's -H option), and a bug
in mit2edf caused an attempt to access unallocated memory for some
inputs. Thanks to Joe Mietus for providing sample inputs that helped
in identifying and resolving these problems.
10.3.12 (9 March 2004):
A beta release of the WFDB_tools package is now available for testing.
This package allows Matlab R13 users to use the WFDB library to read
and write digitized signals and annotations such as those available
from PhysioBank. The WFDB_tools functions are wrappers for the WFDB
library, so that Matlab users can access the full range of capabilities
offered by current and future versions of the WFDB library, including
transparent access to data in a large and growing number of formats,
whether stored locally or on remote web servers. The package was
written and contributed by Jonas Carlson. It has been tested
successfully under GNU/Linux and MS-Windows, and it should be portable
to MacOS X and other platforms supported by Matlab R13. Look for the
WFDB_tools package on PhysioNet.
Thanks to instructions provided by David Linker, and a port of the
XView library by Logan Donaldson, WAVE can now be used under Mac OS X.
No code changes were necessary; it just works!
It has long been possible to use WAVE to view sequence of the 'num'
fields in an annotation file as a signal. This is useful, for example,
for visualizing a series of measurements applied to each beat in an
ECG. WAVE now supports changing the scale of the displayed signal,
using the same controls as for ordinary signals. Also, it is possible
to define default scales for different types of measurements in the
WFDB calibration database (data/wfdbcal), using the annotator name as
the signal type.
Some recent GNU/Linux distributions use a default color for window
backgrounds that makes WAVE's grid invisible. WAVE's resource
(preference) file (wave/Wave.res) has been updated to work around this
problem; it also includes documentation of all other WAVE-specific
settings that can be controlled via this file. Portions of the WAVE
User's Guide related to this subject have also been updated.
Okko Willeboordse pointed out an incompatibility between the native
MS-Windows API and the ANSI/ISO C library function 'mkdir', which is
used by the WFDB library. This does not present a problem when
compiling the WFDB library using the supported Cygwin/gcc compiler
under MS-Windows, nor does any related problem occur on any other
platform. It should now be a little easier to compile the WFDB library
using unsupported compilers, thanks to a new MKDIR macro that hides
the incompatibility (see lib/wfdblib.h0).
Piotr Wlodarek initiated a discussion about memory leaks in the WFDB
library, citing as an example the 'trivial example program in C' from
the WFDB Programmer's Guide, which does not free memory it allocates
in isigopen() when reading the signal specifications. This problem
can be avoided by invoking wfdbquit() in the example program, just
before exiting. Further discussion of this point has been added to
the WFDB Programmer's Guide following the presentation of the 'trivial
example', and in the description of wfdbquit().
Thomas Heldt provided a sample input for `ihr', in which a misplaced
annotation evoked a lengthy interval during which valid inputs were
rejected. This example stimulated a modification to the predictor
used by ihr for outlier detection, in order to avoid such behavior;
see comments in app/ihr.c for details.
Using rdsamp's -v option causes it to print column headings based on
the descriptions of the signals in the input record. The default
signal description as supplied by the WFDB library ('record XXX,
signal N') is abbreviated to 'sig N', but previous versions did not
do this consistently.
Gains and scale factors can now be chosen independently for each
signal when using wrsamp.
The man page for xform (doc/wag-src/xform.1) now documents the -S
option (thanks to Lucy Gibson for pointing out the omission).
10.3.11 (17 October 2003):
Isaac Henry provided a fix for 'configure' to avoid a problem that
may occur in a non-standard Cygwin installation.
In lib/signal.c, several bugs have been identified and fixed. Thanks
to Piotr Wlodarek, who found a buffer overrun in isigopen. Also,
isgsettime sometimes performed incorrect seeks on multifrequency
records that had been opened in high-resolution mode; this has been
fixed, together with a related bug that caused the value returned by
strtim("e") to be calculated incorrectly in some such cases.
New signal types and units have been added to the WFDB calibration
database (data/wfdbcal).
10.3.10 (3 August 2003):
In version 10.3.9, the functions setannstr, setanndesc, and setecgstr
(in lib/annot.c) did not contain necessary checks to avoid invoking
strcmp with a NULL argument. These checks have been added in version
10.3.10. Thanks to Thomas Heldt for reporting this problem. In the
internal function wfdb_addtopath (in lib/wfdbio.c), an extra character
was appended when adding a component to the WFDB path (in version
10.3.9 only); this has also been corrected.
WAVE now incorporates a simplified method for synchronizing multiple
windows. The WAVE version number has been changed from 6.6 to 6.7.
10.3.9 (16 July 2003):
The WFDB library functions setwfdb, setannstr, setanndesc, and
setecgstr now copy their input string arguments, so that it is
no longer necessary for WFDB applications to keep these strings
valid. If you have created applications that rely on being able
to modify these strings, it will be necessary to invoke the
corresponding functions again before such changes will take effect
within the WFDB library.
Previous versions of the WFDB library function putinfo did not
flush their output until either a new header file was created (via
setheader or newheader) or the process exited. This has now been
corrected, and putinfo output is now flushed before putinfo returns.
Thanks to Jonas Carlson for reporting this problem.
10.3.8 (12 July 2003):
The WFDB library function setbasetime (in lib/signal.c) now properly
accepts arguments specifying midnight (e.g., "0:0:0"), which previous
versions rejected, and the function setheader (also in lib/signal.c)
records such times correctly in the .hea files it creates.
epicmp's new -I option allows exclusion of short episodes from all
statistics (the -i option, which remains available, excludes such
episodes from episode counts but includes them in duration tallies.)
Also, previous versions of epicmp (formerly epic) output a "time of
day" string where "0.000" should have appeared if the input record had
a defined base time. This behavior has been corrected (thanks to
Paul Albrecht for the bug report, and for suggesting and providing
an implementation of the -I option).
The bounding box for pschart output has been enlarged so that most
signal labels will not be clipped.
A new application, time2sec, converts a string in WFDB standard
time format into a time interval in seconds.
wfdbdesc now produces output even for records with no signals.
Three highly condensed time scales have been added to those previously
available in WAVE.
Modified psd/hrlomb and psd/hrmem so that the plots they produce are
power, not amplitude, spectra, as psd/hrfft produces. All three of
these scripts can now produce log-log and semi-log plots (make them
by using the new "-l xy" or "-l y" options).
psd/lomb can now accept input series of arbitrary length, and its -P
option (for selecting a power spectrum rather than the default
amplitude spectrum) is now properly documented in its man page.
The -l option of psd/memse is now obsolete; memse can now accept input
series of arbitrary length.
Fixed bugs in convert/readid and convert/makeid. These programs read
and write AHA DB-format tape ID files. The bugs were introduced in
version 10.0.1 (!); the programs should work properly again, if anyone
still needs to use them.
10.3.7 (6 May 2003):
Fixed a bug in xform, introduced in 10.3.4, that prevented xform from
reading the output sampling frequency from the standard input. Thanks
to Thomas Heldt for the bug report.
10.3.6 (7 April 2003):
The fix applied in isigclose() in 10.3.5 was incomplete but is now
(really!) fixed. Applications that use sample() should call wfdbquit()
to be certain that sample's buffer is freed before exiting.
Some long-standing problems in the code (in lib/wfdbio.c) that handles
http range requests for NETFILES-enabled versions of the library have
been partially addressed. The underlying issue is that http servers
do not always return the range of bytes requested; when this happens,
it is not difficult to determine that there is a problem, but it is
tricky to figure out what to do about it. Based on experiments with
several different http servers, the strategy for handling such problems
within the WFDB NETFILES code has been improved substantially, but
there may be further room for improvement.
10.3.5 (31 March 2003):
Fixed a bug in WFDB library function isigclose() (in lib/signal.c)
that had caused sample()'s buffer to be freed inappropriately when
switching segments in a multi-segment record. Thanks to Dave
Schaffer for the bug report and for a test case that illustrated
the bug.
10.3.4 (30 March 2003):
xform now handles input and output sampling frequencies that are not
exact multiples of 1 Hz.
Added SRCDIR definition in configure and conf/cygwin.def.
10.3.3 (20 March 2003):
Fixed man page installation bug; thanks to Joe Mietus for the bug
report.
Updated INSTALL (installation notes).
10.3.2 (25 February 2003):
New applications wav2mit and mit2wav create WFDB-format records from
files in the widely-used .wav audio format and vice versa.
New application nguess estimates the locations of missing normal
sinus heart beats in an annotation file.
When running multiple WAVE processes started from a single command,
it is now possible to update all of the signal windows by selecting
a sample in the master signal window (using <control>+<middle mouse
button>).
WAVE now handles invalid entries in the signal list properly; thanks
to Joe Mietus for the bug report.
Changed options in ann2rr to support more flexible output formatting.
Fixed a WFDB library bug that caused annotation sorting to fail
if a new header file had been written. Thanks to Winton Baker for
reporting this problem and for providing an example that illustrated
the bug.
Fixed a bug in mit2edf that caused a crash instead of printing help
if no arguments were supplied on the command line; thanks to Jesus
Olivan for the bug report.
Better input checking in edf2mit; fixed bugs in handling of unusual
signal lists.
Fixed a bug in snip that caused a crash if -a was the last option
on the command line; thanks to Joe Mietus for the bug report.
Fixed installation bugs in psd/hr* scripts and psd/Makefile.tpl.
Corrected a documentation bug in WAVE's on-line help.
Revised rpm.spec and rules (in Makefile.tpl) for creating RPMs.
There are now separate wfdb, wfdb-devel, wfdb-app, wfdb-doc, and
wfdb-wave RPMs.
10.3.1 (5 December 2002):
Added a -W option to ann2rr to create 2-column output containing
intervals in seconds and annotation mnemonics, and modified the
interval calculations to avoid accumulated roundoff error.
Fixed a bug that caused WAVE to crash when the main window was
resized if the open record had 3 or more signals, and added two
high-resolution time scales in modepan.c.
Fixed a bug in edf2mit that caused crashes when using the -s option,
and another bug in mit2edf that caused crashes when converting a
record with a frame rate of less than 1 Hz. Thanks to Jesus Olivan
for reporting these problems and for providing test cases that were
helpful in developing and testing the fixes.
Wei Zong has contributed an arterial blood pressure pulse detector
for continuous ABP signals, which has been added to the package
(see wabp).
10.3.0 (26 November 2002):
The WFDB Software Package has been ported to MacOS/X (Darwin),
version 10.2 (the port should also work under 10.1 but this
has not been tested and will not be supported).
It is now possible to generate a shared WFDB library (DLL)
under MS-Windows using Cygwin/gcc.
Fixed bugs in lib/signal.c that caused improper accounting of
signal group numbers when reading from two or more records at
the same time (as in 'nst'), a bug that caused a segfault in
'nst', and a bug that referenced uninitialized memory in
newheader() if nsig = 0.
Added functions sample() and sample_valid() to the WFDB library
(in lib/signal.c). sample(s, t) returns the sample at time (sample
number) t from signal s, handling all necessary buffering
internally and allowing the caller to treat the signal file
as a virtual array of randomly accessible samples. sample_valid()
can be invoked to check if the most recent value returned by
sample() was valid (e.g., to see if the end of the input was
reached). For an example of the use of these functions, see
app/wqrs.c .
Use -p -p to obtain higher precision in 'rdsamp' output.
New -w option for 'ann2rr' and 'rr2ann' for attaching annotation
types to intervals.
Fixed a subtle bug in 'bxb' that caused it to count matching
annotations as mismatches in very rare circumstances when the heart
rate exceeds 200 bpm. The effect of this bug was only to cause
a tiny fraction of correct detections to be counted as errors, and not
to cause detector errors to be counted as correct. Thanks to James
Pardey for reporting the problem and for providing a test case that
was useful for developing and testing the fix. See the comments in
'app/bxb.c' for details.
The application formerly known as 'epic' has be renamed 'epicmp'
(episode comparator), to avoid conflicts with a new but widely
distributed IRC chat client named 'epic'.
Conversion of floating-point values to integer samples has been
modified to obtain better cross-platform consistency in psfd and
wrsamp.
Wei Zong's length-transform-based QRS detector, wqrs, has been
added to the package.
New 'mit2edf' application converts records to European Data Format.
Numerous updates in the WFDB Applications Guide.
10.2.9 (27 October 2002):
Fixed a bug in example 9 in the WFDB Programmer's Guide (introduced
in version 10.2.0).
Updated lib/wfdbdll.def and the 'Makefile.dos' files in several
directories. These have not been tested in recent years and may
need further revisions; feedback is welcome.
Corrected persistent problems with generating PDF versions of the
manuals for the desired page size, and added hyperlinks to the
PDF version of the WFDB Programmer's Guide.
10.2.8 (14 October 2002):
Fixed a bug in WAVE that occasionally caused a crash when starting
up; also repaired a broken link in WAVE's on-line help.
10.2.7 (8 August 2002):
Added a workaround to wfdb_fclose() (in lib/wfdbio.c) so that
closing stdin after using freopen doesn't trigger a core dump.
If out-of-order annotations were written and automatic annotation
sorting was suppressed, the warning produced by oannclose() (in
lib/annot.c) once again includes the correct 'sortann' command
needed to put the annotations into order. (This feature was broken
by a previous revision.)
Added 'ahaconvert', a shell script (in convert) that can reformat
all (or any subset) of the records on an AHA DB CD-ROM using a2m
and ad2m. 'a2m' and 'ad2m' now do a better job of automatically
recognizing their input file types, and 'ad2m' now converts
long-format as well as short-format AHA .CMP (signal) files
correctly.
Numerous updates and corrections in the WFDB Applications Guide.
10.2.6 (24 June 2002):
Added setifreq() and getifreq() to the WFDB library. setifreq
allows the caller to resample an input record at any convenient
sampling frequency, using getvec() to perform xform's resampling
algorithm transparently. Thanks to Pat Hamilton for the inspiration!
The complementary getifreq returns the current getvec frequency
(either the native sampling frequency of the current record, or
the frequency previously set using setifreq()). Times expressed
in sample intervals passed to or from other WFDB functions (getann,
putann, timstr, mstimstr, strtim) are rescaled to match the intervals
corresponding to the chosen frequency.
'sqrs' and 'sqrs125' now use setifreq() to resample their inputs.
Added 'wfdb-config', a tiny program (in app) that reports the WFDB
library version and linking information (similar to libwww-config,
gtk-config, etc.).
The WFDB library now records the base time with millisecond precision
(previous versions did so with one-second precision), and 'xform'
provides starting times to the library function 'setbasetime' with
millisecond precision. Thanks to Allavatam Venugopal for providing
examples that illustrated the need for these features.
Fixed handling of absolute time strings in 'ann2rr', 'bxb', 'epic',
'fir', 'ihr', 'mxm', 'pscgen', 'rdann', and 'rxr' (all in app).
Fixed deskewing buffer initialization in getframe() (in lib/signal.c).
broken by the 10.2.0 update, which introduced an infinite loop when
reading a record that requires skew correction starting at sample 0.
Thanks to Andrew Walsh for finding an example that triggered this bug.
Fixed rounding errors in adumuv(), muvadu(), and physadu() (all in
lib/signal.c). Previous versions rounded negative values toward zero;
to obtain consistent conversions, however, it is necessary to round
all values down (e.g., from -1.5 to -2 rather than up to -1).
Fixed a memory leak in wfdb_fclose() (in lib/wfdbio.h), and made
additional minor changes for portability (in lib/calib.c, lib/signal.c,
and lib/wfdblib.h). Thanks to Ion GaztaƱaga for bug reports, for his
careful notes on compiling the WFDB library using Borland C++ Builder
(see INSTALL for a summary), and for testing intermediate versions
of the library.
Fixed a bug in checkpkg/appcheck, which was correctly testing xform
with NETFILES and reporting any errors, but was not counting errors
in this test.
10.2.5 (10 March 2002):
New output format options in 'ann2rr' and 'ihr'.
FreeBSD support in 'configure', new conf/freebsd* (thanks to
Giuseppe Pagnoni).
Added support for annotation maps from wfdb/ecgmap.h to the Fortran
wrappers (fortran/wfdbf.c) and fixed two typos there.
Removed unneeded references to wfdb/wfdb.h from waverc/wave-remote.c
and waverc/wavescript.c (thanks again to Giuseppe Pagnoni).
10.2.4 (20 December 2001):
Bug fixes in 'pschart' and 'psfd' (vbuf was not properly initialized
before its first use).
10.2.3 (14 December 2001):
Portability fixes in 'configure', 'install.sh', 'wave/Makefile.tpl',
'psd/hr*', 'doc/*.sh', 'lib/wfdblib.h', and 'checkpkg/*check'.
Updated 'checkpkg/appcheck' to use WFDBANNSORT when testing 'sortann'.
The full package is now much smaller because the figures for the
WAVE User's Guide are now generated as needed from compressed ppm
files. Also, 'doc/texindex.c' and 'doc/texi2html' have been removed
from the package (these are now more widely available than when they
were originally included, and relatively few users need them).
Added rules for creating 'dbu.hlp' (MS-Windows help file version of
the WFDB Programmer's Guide) to doc/Makefile.tpl. Updated rules for
generating the info version of the Programmer's Guide.
Special pipe and tape header files from 'data' are now installed
by default.
Added rules for creating WFDB source and binary RPMs to the top-level
Makefile.tpl.
10.2.2 (29 November 2001):
WAVE can now be used to view and edit annotations for records that
have no signals.
The WAVE User's Guide has been moved to the 'doc' directory, and
the process of formatting it is now better integrated with that for
the other WFDB guides.
In 'ihr', the use of an uninitialized variable ('lasttime') caused
some non-outlier data in the first few samples to be rejected
incorrectly. This has now been fixed.
10.2.1 (16 November 2001):
Most users will no longer need to set the WFDB path explicitly, as a
result of several minor changes in the default path and in the
installer for the WFDB Software Package.
The environment variable WFDBNOSORT was replaced by WFDBANNSORT, and
the environment variable WFDBGVMODE was introduced (see 'Annotation
Order' and 'Multi-Frequency Records', in the WFDB Programmer's Guide,
for details).
10.2.0 (15 October 2001):
The 10.2 series differs from all earlier releases in that the WFDB
library no longer imposes any fixed limits on the numbers of annotators
or signals that can be open simultaneously. There is also no
fixed limit on the number of samples per signal per frame. The
constants WFDB_MAXANN, WFDB_MAXSIG, and WFDB_MAXSPF, which determined
these limits in previous versions of the library, are still defined in
lib/wfdb.h for compatibility with older programs that use them, e.g.,
to set array sizes.
In this release, almost all of the WFDB applications, including WAVE,
those in the 'app' and 'examples' directories, and convert/edf2mit,
have been revised so that they can handle arbitrary numbers of signals
and (where applicable) annotation files. The exceptions are:
sample
limited by the number of channels provided by the ADC/DAC it uses
view, wview
use 'gtkwave' (http://www.physionet.org/physiotools/beta/gtkwave)
Also please note the new 'checkpkg' directory, which contains a variety
of tests to check the basic functionality of the WFDB library and many
of the WFDB applications. From the base directory, run the tests by:
make check
These tests will check the currently installed version of the WFDB
software package. If you use them to check an old version, there may
be minor discrepancies because of changes in the output formats; you
should not encounter any discrepancies if you use these tests after
installing this version of the WFDB software package.
As always, your comments are welcome!
George (george@mit.edu)