Expectation-Driven Text Extraction from Medical Ultrasound Images

In this study an expectation-driven approach is proposed to extract data stored as pixel structures in medical ultrasound images. Prior knowledge about certain properties like the position of the text and its background and foreground grayscale values is utilized. Several open source Java libraries are used to pre-process the image and extract the textual information. The results are presented in an Excel table together with the outcome of several consistency checks. After manually correcting potential errors, the outcome is automatically stored in the main database. The proposed system yielded excellent results, reaching an accuracy of 99.94% and reducing the necessary human effort to a minimum.