Disease-specific extraction of text from cardiac echo videos for decision support

Echo videos are an important modality for cardiac decision support. In addition to describing the shape and motion of the heart, they capture important diagnostic measurements as textual feature-value pairs that are good indicators of the underlying disease. In this paper, we describe reliable extraction of such textual information through selective image processing and region extraction prior to using an OCR engine. We then use tabular layout analysis rules to recover measurement attribute value pairs from the recognized text in videos. The measurement feature-value pairs are used to retrieve matching videos from a database.1 A ranked list of matching diseases is then obtained through collaborative filtering. Results are demonstrated on a large echo video database of patients with various diseases. © 2009 IEEE.