Course Introduction MATLAB with examples from Health Science

The course C171/15 Introduction MATLAB with examples from Health Science is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, 2024.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students).

Requirements for participation: No basic knowledge is required. Students must bring own laptop with MATLAB installed (version 2020 or later).       

Aim: To provide participants basic understanding of the programming environment MATLAB. Enable participants to use built-in MATLAB functions and create own scripts and functions for data evaluation and visualization.  

Learning outcomes: After completion of the course, the student should be able to understand and be able to use: 

• The MATLAB program in general including editor, command window, and help
• MATLAB data structures including matrices, cells and structs 
• Generic programming principles including loops, conditions, functions 
• MATLAB graphics for plotting and vitalization of data 
• MATLAB Debugging capability 

Workload: The full workload of the course is 42 hours (28 hours of confrontation + 14 hours of final exam-assignment). As preparation between course days, we invite you to submit class assignments to receive feedback.

Content: The course divides into four full days of lectures with optional, recommended home-assignments in the days between. The topics of the lectures are: 

Day 1       Fundamentals and visualization 

                   The MATLAB environment, loading and saving data, basic matrix operations. 

                   Basic plots, including 2D and 3D plots, image visualization. 

Day 2      Basic Programming: Functions 

                   Scripts, functions, debugging and “good practice” in programming. 

Day 3       Basic Programming: Loops and Conditions 

                   Loops and conditions 

Day 4       Data Handling 

                   Logical data, relational operations, logical indexing. Data types (strings, cell, struct, tables etc.) 

                   Importing/exporting data. 

The lessons will be a mixture of teaching and training. During the day, you will get data and script files for the training. On alternating days, we expect you to work at home with the topics. 

The course ends with a mandatory exam assignment with a deadline two weeks after end of course (pass/no pass). 

The audience for this course is primarily scientists within the area of health-research, who plan to employ MATLAB for analysis of data. Other scientists using MATLAB for the first time may also benefit from the course, even though data examples are on patient information, data time series and neuro-imaging data. 

Instructors: Christine Ahrends, Laura Masaracchia, Ana Teresa Queiroga and Irene Klærke Mikkelsen

Venue: Aarhus University, Aarhus.

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Health Research Year students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 04 November 2024 09:00 - 16:00
• 07 November 2024 09:00 - 16:00
• 11 November 2024 09:00 - 16:00
• 14 November 2024 09:00 - 16:00