Create Live Script with Multiple Interactive Controls

This example shows how you can use interactive controls to visualize and investigate patient data in MATLAB. Using a variety of interactive controls, you can filter a list of patients and then plot the age and systolic blood pressure of the filtered list, highlighting the patients over a specified blood pressure.

The example uses variables to control the slider and spinner values, as well as the drop-down list items. For instance, to filter the patient list by location, insert a drop-down list and select the locationStrings variable to populate the items in the list. To filter the patient list by age, insert a slider and select the minAge and maxAge variables as the Min and Max values. To specify a threshold systolic blood pressure, insert a spinner and select the minPressure and maxPressure variables as the Min and Max values.

To filter the data only when the Filter Data button is pressed, set the Run execution option for the drop-down list, checkbox, slider, and edit field to Nothing.

To view and interact with the controls, open this example in your browser or in MATLAB.

filename = "patients.xls";
T = readtable(filename);

locationStrings = ["VA Hospital","County General Hospital","St. Mary's Medical Center"];
selectedLocation = locationStrings(1);

isSmoker = true;

maxAge = max(T.Age);
minAge = min(T.Age);
minimumAge = 31;

nameContains = "e";

 

idx = T.Location==selectedLocation & T.Smoker==isSmoker & T.Age>=minimumAge;
if ~strcmp(nameContains,"")
    idx = idx & contains(T.LastName,nameContains);
end
TFiltered = T(idx,:);

minPressure = min(TFiltered.Systolic);
maxPressure = max(TFiltered.Systolic);
thresholdPressure = 123;

TOverThreshold = TFiltered(TFiltered.Systolic>=thresholdPressure,:);

sp1 = scatter(TFiltered.Age,TFiltered.Systolic);
hold on
sp2 = scatter(TOverThreshold.Age,TOverThreshold.Systolic,"red");
hold off

title("Age vs. Systolic Blood Pressure of Patients")
xlabel("Age")
ylabel("Systolic Blood Pressure")

legendText = sprintf("Patients with systolic blood pressure over %d mmHg",thresholdPressure);
legend(sp2,legendText,Location="southoutside")