Security Filtering of Medical Images using OCR

James Z. Wang
The Pennsylvania State University

Abstract:

Before digital medical images in computer-based patient record systems can be distributed online, it is necessary for confidentiality reasons to eliminate patient identification information that appears in the images. We present an automatic security filtering algorithm for on-line medical image distribution using Daubechies' wavelets and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The system is practical for real-world applications, processing and coding each 12-bit image of size 512 x 512 within 2 seconds on a Pentium Pro. Besides its exceptional speed, the security filter has demonstrated high accuracy in detecting sensitive textual information within current or digitized previous medical images. The algorithm is of linear run time.


Full Paper
(PDF, 0.2MB)


© 2001 RCDL. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the RCDL.

Last Modified: April 8, 2002
© 2002, James Z. Wang