2.3.2 The WFDB software package

Over the past twenty years, the team at PhysioNet has developed a large collection of open source software to store, analyze and manipulate physiological measurements (14).The WFDB software package is written in highly portable C and can be used on all popular platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OSX, MS-Windows, and all versions of Unix. A set of wrappers allow the integration of the WFDB library with other programming languages and interfaces so that the tools can also be run from within visualization tools or other programming environments. Table 2.3 summarizes the major components of the WFDB Software Package; a more detailed description is available at the PhysioNet web site (http://www.physionet.org/).

Table 2.3: WFDB software package major components

Component	Description
WFDB library	This is a set of functions for reading and writing files in the formats used by PhysioBank databases. The library supports reading directly from remote servers allowing applications linked with the WFDB library to view or analyze data without the need to download entire records and to store them locally.The WFDB library is implemented in C but provides interfaces for software written using Perl, Python, C# (and other .NET languages), Java, Matlab, PHP, Ruby, TCL, and several versions of Lisp.
WFDB applications	A large set of well-tested, interoperable command-line tools for signal processing and automated analysis.These applications are described in detail in the WFDB Applications Guide (14).
Visualization tools: WAVE	Extensible interactive graphical environment for manipulating sets of digitized signals with optional annotations