MATLAB Programming Fundamentals - MathWorks

Element-by-Element Organization

Consider a database with patient information. Each record contains data for the patient’s

name, test results, and billing amount.

These statements create an element in a structure array named patient:

patient(1).name = 'John Doe';

patient(1).billing = 127.00;

patient(1).test = [79, 75, 73; 180, 178, 177.5; 220, 210, 205];

Additional patients correspond to new elements in the structure. For example, add an

element for a second patient:

patient(2).name = 'Ann Lane';

patient(2).billing = 28.50;

patient(2).test = [68, 70, 68; 118, 118, 119; 172, 170, 169];

Element-by-element organization supports simple indexing to access data for a particular

patient. For example, find the average of the first patient’s test results, calculating by

rows (dimension 2 ) rather than by columns:

aveResultsDoe = mean(patient(1).test,2)

This code returns

aveResultsDoe =

75.6667

11 Structures