A Review of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Healthcare
Aishwarya Bhure · International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology · 2021
Information is present everywhere in newspapers, magazines, documents etc. but healthcare information majorly consisting of medicine labels, drug information, and personal health records etc. is something which is important and confidential at the same time. Today's world is the world of digitization. Technology is advancing day by day and medical healthcare is no exception. Everyday millions of electronic health records (EHR's) are generated, hundreds of invoices are generated, and prescriptions are written. But how to categorize this data and make the best out of it? Optical character recognition (OCR) proves to be of great help in this field. OCR can be used to categorize the EHR's under certain labels. Even most of the time a physician's written prescription is unrecognizable. With the help of OCR, this text can be identified. Knowing one's medicine is highly important , it is easy for normal people but considering visually impaired people, OCR and TTS technologies can be used to get these and other clinical information available to them in the form of an audio. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technique where images or scanned records are perused and converted into OCR recognizable characters, which are then extended for editing and searching purposes. Pattern Recognition techniques and advanced Computer Vision are the main building blocks of working behind an OCR. The paper discusses the role of OCR in various healthcare applications.