Online medical symbol recognition using a Tablet PC

In this paper we describe a scheme to enhance the usability of Tablet PC handwriting recognition systems by creating a software module for recognizing symbols that are not a part of the Tablet PC symbol library. The goal of this work is to make handwriting recognition more useful for medical professionals accustomed to using medical symbols in medical records. To demonstrate that this new symbol recognition module is robust and expandable, we report results on both a medical symbol set and an expanded symbol test set which includes selected mathematical symbols.