OCR Medical Report / Electronic Health Record Scanning Software

Question

I want to collect data from a longitudinal medical study. This means several tens of thousands of physical documents, that can contain printed text, handwritten annotations, checkboxes, anatomical schemes and images, with many different layouts due to various sources and temporal distribution.

Is there a software option or SDK that specializes in the medical field and would aid me with this task? I know about the common solutions from ABBYY, IRIS, LEADTOOLS and so on and they partly advertise document processing in the medical environment, but are either specialized in highly structured forms or say nothing about their application at all. I also know abaout several approaches to document classification using AI in the non-medical sector, maybe somebody has dared the adaptation allready.

Requirements:

• Input: rasterized images
• Languages: western european (mostly german and italian)
• Output: preferably in JSON format
• Platform: Linux / Windows
• On-Premises

(I am a bit surprised that the associated tags icr, iwr, hwr and omr do not exist yet, but I can't create them either.)

Answer 1

I'm part of the LEADTOOLS support team, so I can provide information about our SDK.

We have features for general OCR that can turn general document images to text. This includes automatic zone detection to distinguish between text and picture areas. It can also work with hand-written text, provided the text is neatly and clearly hand-printed.

Regarding "checkboxes", you will almost always need to pre-define the boxes or bubbles for OMR to work properly. If the input OMR images are part of structured forms (like questionnaires), and the number of form designs is finite, you could define a distinct master form for each type of document, and our forms recognition module can sort them out and extract data from them, correcting for reasonable shifts and rotations.

If you would like to try our modules, we have a fully functioning free evaluation that you can find here. The evaluation comes with free email and online chat support and you can contact support before and during evaluation with any questions you have.