Hi Erik,

Thanks for your reply; I'm glad I was able to help.  We're using PESTICA on subjects for whom we have measured pulse ox data but no respiratory data, and the PESTICA estimates of the peak locations line up extremely well with our measured cardiac data.  For advertising purposes, I've attached an image illustrating this for the very first subject I ran through PESTICA.  The next thing for me is to hack together a script that gets all subjects through stages 1 and 2, then does everybody's interactive stage 3, and finally crunches stages 4 through 6 noninteractively.  It would be really nice if PESTICA could come up with plausible filters and then ask me afterwards whether they were good enough, but I'm having trouble seeing how one would automate that decision.

Thanks for the cool tool,
Isaac Schwabacher

P.S.: Another thing I noticed while I was picking through the code was that the various MATLAB scripts use the MATLAB call if(exist('some_var')==0) to check whether an optional parameter to a function needs to be initialized with a default value.  But if I'm reading the MATLAB documentation right, that test also checks the filesystem for some_var, some_var.m, and various other files in $MATLABPATH.  I imagine that this could lead to behavior that's hard to reproduce if someone has custom libraries installed.

EDIT: While I was trying to hack run_pestica.sh to read a default value for PESTICA_SLICE_TIMING from the dataset header, I had a problem where MATLAB would ignore the commands I gave it on the command line and instead prompt me for input on stdin.  A little digging revealed, to my utter disbelief, that matlab is merely a shell script that calls the executable MATLAB, and the -r option labors to preserve its argument from shell expansion by a laughable procedure involving awk and multiple invocations of /bin/echo.  I quickly replaced -r with <<< to redirect stdin directly, and the problem was solved.  This has the additional benefit of allowing MATLAB to run in the background, which it otherwise stubbornly refuses to do.