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UB, UR technologies place prescriptions on digital paper
By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
Contributing Editor
Illegible prescriptions scrawled on physicians' notepads could become a thing of the past, thanks to two complementary technologies developed at the University at Buffalo and the University of Rochester that together are being licensed by mobileLexis, a digital paper solutions company based in Salt Lake City.
The company plans to use the technologies, which were marketed together through a new effort to commercialize research conducted at upstate New York institutions, to develop a secure, electronic prescription system using digital paper.
Accuscript uses the physical attributes of each handwritten character to precisely recognize what has been written.
"Since we focus on the health-care, financial and government markets, we needed to have both a reliable and robust means of translating the handwritten information from paper to computer and a powerful and proprietary method of securing that information for Internet transfer," said Rod Sheets, president of mobileLexis.
"Accuscript and AuthentImage resolve both of these issues quite nicely and more than satisfy our data requirements," he said.
Digital paper, which is not yet on the market, looks and feels like its pulp-derived ancestor, but is endlessly reusable, recording, capturing and sending text that users write by hand, using a specially designed, electronic pen.
Accuscript, the UB technology, allows for unmatched handwriting recognition on digital paper, while AuthentImage, the U of R technology, is a digital-authentication package that ensures both the security and integrity of documents on digital paper.
The two technologies together provide mobileLexis with critical features for its MDScript product, which will process prescriptions in real-time through the transmission of pen-stroke information to a computer or server. The Accuscript technology will translate the handwritten information into digital data and the AuthentImage technology then will secure it for transmission to the pharmacy or health-care insurance provider.
The two technologies also will be used for products mobileLexis is developing for other applications.
Accuscript is a software program ideally suited for instantly turning handwriting on digital paper into digital data, according to its principal UB developers, Venu Govindaraju, M.S. '88, Ph.D.'92, professor of computer science and engineering and associate director of UB's Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR), and Hanhong Xue, Ph.D. '02, now an employee of IBM.
"Some handwriting-recognition programs are designed to ignore the 'noise' that occurs when people write on paper, things like smudges or other marks that are not part of the letters themselves," explained Govindaraju.
"That feature, which is critical in hard-copy applications, will not result in optimal performance in a digital-paper application," he explained. "Accuscript, on the other hand, works best with the perfectly clean images that result when users write on digital paper."
The ability to ignore handwritten "noise," Govindaraju explained, is a function that must be built into a software package at its most fundamental level so it is intrinsic to the way the package will function.
While most consumers are familiar with the use of the electronic pads they use to sign for packages or when they charge a purchase, Govindaraju said those gadgets only capture data; they do not contain any handwriting-recognition features.
"Most of these online devices are just for signatures and nobody ever will read or recognize them unless there's a question about one of them," he said. "But with digital paper applications, the bar is much higher. The software has to be application-specific so that a basic lexicon, or vocabulary, can be constructed, which guides the software program in recognizing words correctly."
Govindaraju pointed out that while Accuscript's first application may be in the medical-information field, it easily can be customized to any application.
Work on customizing the UB research is being sponsored by mobileLexis.
AuthentImage is a new way to hide information within an ordinary digital image and to extract it again without distorting the original image or the data. The new technique will solve a dilemma faced by digital-image users, particularly in sensitive military, legal and medical applications. Until now, users have had to choose between an image that's been watermarked to establish its trustworthiness and one that isn't watermarked but preserves all the original information, allowing it to be enlarged or enhanced to show detail. When information is embedded using the new method, authorized users can do both.
"The technique will be widely applicable to situations requiring authentication of images with detection of changes, and it also can be used to encode information about the image itself, such as who took the picture, when or with what camera," said Murat Tekalp, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Rochester and co-creator of the technology.
"The greatest benefit is in determining if anyone has clandestinely altered an image. These days, many commercial software systems can be used to manipulate digital images. By encoding data in this way, we can be sure the image has not been tampered with and then remove the data within it without harming the quality of the picture," he said.
Although the technique currently is implemented in software, it could be implemented in hardware or firmware—software stored in read-only memory or programmable read-only memory—in trusted devices where image integrity is critical to the application. For instance, the technique could be used in a trusted digital camera used to gather forensic evidence to be later used at a trial. If information is embedded in the images captured with the camera using the new algorithms, any subsequent manipulations of the pictures could be detected and the area where they occurred pinpointed.
AuthentImage was licensed to mobileLexis in July and UB is in the process of finalizing the license of Accuscript to mobileLexis.
CEDAR is the largest research center in the world devoted to developing new technologies that can recognize and read handwriting. Over the past decade, CEDAR has worked with the U.S. Postal Service developing and refining handwriting recognition software for postal applications.