Document Image Processing for Hospital Information Systems

In this chapter, we introduce document image processing methods and their applications in the field of Medical (and Clinical) Science. Though the use of electronic health record systems are gradually spreading especially among big hospitals in Japan, and e-health environment will be thoroughly available in near future [1–3], a large amount of paper based medical records are still stocked in medical record libraries in hospitals. They are the long histories of medical examinations of each patient and, indeed, good sources for clinical research and better patient care. Because of the importance of these paper documents, some hospitals have started to computerize them as image files or as PDF files in which the patient ID is the only reliable key to retrieve them, however most hospitals have kept them as they are. This is due to the large cost of computerization and also the relatively low benefit of documents that can only be retrieved by patient ID. Indeed, the true objective of computerization of paper records is to give them functionality so that they can be used in clinical research such as to extract similar cases among them. If we cannot find out any practical solutions to this problem, large amounts of these paper based medical records will soon be buried in book vaults and might be discarded in near future. Thus we are confronted with a challenge to devise a good system which is easy to run and can smoothly incorporate the paper based large histories of medical records into the e-health environment.