Medical document reader on Android smartphone

Abstract

This paper presents a method for reading medical documents by using an Android smartphone. We have used techniques based on the Tesseract OCR Engine to extract the text content from medical document images such as a physical examination report. The following factors related to the document are considered: character font, text block size, and distance between the document and the camera on the phone. Based on experimental results, we found that among three character fonts (Angsana New, Calibri, and Tahoma), Calibri and Tahoma gave very high average accuracies (greater than 90%) for both character recognition and word recognition, but Angsana New gave quite a lower accuracy, about 75%. For the optimal distance between the document and the smartphone, the recommended distance is from 12 cm. to 15 cm. for a document block size of 21 × 3, 13 × 10, 12 × 8, or 10 × 13 cm2.