The following is a collection of articles showing how LEADTOOLS SDKs can be used to solve real-world problems.
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There is no question that DICOM Hanging Protocol is an important feature for busy physicians. One only needs to look at the vast number of display layout options offered by different applications, and to the specialized views for different medical disciplines such as radiology, cardiology, mammography, dental, etc. Naturally, these specialized viewing preferences for various specialties has led to equally specialized software. That is great for individual practices, but in a larger setting such as a hospital, all this disparate software creates additional costs since each department needs its own viewer, and possibly even its own PACS. What if there was a better, faster, and more cost-efficient way for every physician, technician, nurse, and patient to view their images easily and intuitively using a single viewer application with all the institution’s images stored in a single archive?
For many of us, a day hardly goes by without seeing a barcode. For software developers, this creates immense opportunities to create software that handles both the encoding and decoding of barcodes. How does a developer or project manager get started on their path to success? When you boil it down, there are two primary questions you should ask: Which barcodes should I use? How will I use them? This white paper will help clear the muddied waters surrounding both of these questions by detailing several of the most popular barcodes and how programmers can use the award winning imaging SDK technology in LEADTOOLS to quickly and easily develop their application.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a technology and concept that is familiar to the majority of programmers: take a picture with words and convert it to text. It sure sounds simple, but implementing it well is often much harder than it looks. Much like watching a professional surfer and trying to do it yourself, developers get bruised, tired, and nearly drown in the endless waves of images with varying fonts, bad scans, dust speckles, and paper crinkles finding new problems in your algorithm. Save yourself some headache and use LEADTOOLS, the most accurate, fast, and easy-to-use OCR SDK on the market!
When it comes to change, the desire for efficiency is surely at or near the top of the list of reasons. Some processes and industries are harder to change, especially those that have been around for a long time. Court systems in many countries are one of the oldest and most well established processes to ensure all-around fairness, even if it must sacrifice expediency. Thankfully, the legal industry has taken major strides towards adapting to the digital age with the evolution of eDiscovery and document imaging.
A wide variety of businesses are embracing technology as a means to enhance the way customers provide their information on the front-end of the customer service process. Upon arrival at the doctor's office, car dealership, gym, or even a restaurant, customers might be handed a tablet or directed to a kiosk to check in. This is an exciting change for device manufacturers and software developers, but does it always translate to better customer service? An ideal solution would rapidly capture information from a document or form of ID customers already have on them such as a driver's license. This white paper will explore how programmers can use LEADTOOLS Driver's License Recognition or Barcode Recognition to extract identifying information from driver's licenses.
Scan anything, anywhere, any time. That is the dream for many people, and today's technology is making that a reality. Using a camera such as those on smartphones to capture information provides flexibility and can do things that a traditional scanner cannot. With the right image processing tools, a camera can capture receipts, documents, business cards, whiteboards, large format drawings, periodical pages, and of course snapshots of business associates and friends with extremely high quality.
Clients have high expectations for video streaming playback, and the responsibility of a positive user experience is almost completely in the server's court. Even in the case of a poor or fluctuating connection, clients expect to have continuous playback without stuttering or long buffering pauses. Furthermore, viewers expect to watch the same video on all of their devices. This is no small order for content providers. Thankfully, developers and server administrators can use the LEADTOOLS Media Streaming Server SDK to quickly and easily build professional audio/video multimedia streaming applications for playback on any device at a fraction of the cost of other proprietary methods.
A common problem that faces many developers is extending existing applications when changing the underlying source code is not a possibility. As needs and systems change, there has to be a mechanism to add new functionality and maintain efficient workflows for end-users. The LEADTOOLS Virtual Printer SDK is one of several solutions LEADTOOLS provides to overcome this problem.
Health Level Seven (HL7) Messaging has gained widespread popularity and acceptance as a flexible standard of exchanging structured electronic health information. HL7 can enable communication and interoperability between standardized information and imaging systems such as Electronic Health Records (EHR), Hospital Information System (HIS), Radiology Information System (RIS), Laboratory Information System (LIS), and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS), as well as any individual practice management or front-office application used by health care providers for tasks such as billing and patient tracking. The LEADTOOLS HL7 SDK simplifies the integration of complex HL7 standards into any health care application and developers can create full-featured, HL7-compliant PACS in record time.
As much as credit cards and digital wallets have tried to take over, checks are still a very prevalent and practical way to make payments and financial transactions. However, just because consumers and businesses are still relying on traditional, paper-based financial transactions doesn't mean that technology can't streamline deposits and improve customer satisfaction. How are financial institutions implementing these features? And what benefits are there for other businesses not in the financial sector? LEADTOOLS includes a robust Check Scanning and Processing SDK that combines MICR and OCR to process checks and is already being used by a number of applications across banking, insurance and retail industries.
The demand for zero-footprint applications is growing rapidly, especially in the health care industry with the increasing popularity and usage of tablets and mobile devices by health care providers. There are many ways to display DICOM images and communicate with a PACS over the web or intranet in a zero-footprint manner, but not all applications are created equal. Any zero-footprint application must do a significant portion of work at the server, but this typically causes a tradeoff in features and performance for which developers must find the proper balance. LEADTOOLS overcomes these problems with an advanced AngularJS framework that is able to query any PACS and window level and annotate 16-bit grayscale images on an HTML5 canvas.
TWAIN scanning and document capture is an essential aspect and starting point of most document imaging applications. For web developers, this is a problematic requirement due to the localized, hardware-dependent nature of TWAIN scanners and image capture devices. Many roadblocks await the developer and most often the client is left with tedious and time-wasting inconveniences that make the application difficult to use. LEADTOOLS has developed a Web Scanning SDK that solves many of these obstacles and offers a programmer-friendly and customizable framework for integrating TWAIN scanning into any web-based document imaging solution.
There is no doubt that imaging technologies such as forms recognition and OCR have revolutionized the way we do business and have freed up countless man-hours from the tedious and error-prone task of data entry. However, these technologies still rely on the assumption that the data will be located in the same place on every document. Unstructured forms and scanned documents such as invoices, bills, and tabs are notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to process on a large scale within an automated system. This is no longer the case after the release of LEADTOOLS Version 19 and its advanced Invoice Recognition and Processing SDK technology.
Convert a Word document into a PDF file. View the PDF, annotate it, and then save it. This process sounds simple enough, right? What if the original document was a TIFF file? Is it just as easy to convert a TIFF to a PDF and then view, annotate, and save the new file? What if you have ten different file types to view, annotate, and save, and what if those different files are both raster images and vector documents? And what if your job requirement specified that you can only do this task in one application, using one viewer control? This commonly requested task no longer sounds so simple. The new Document Converter and Document Viewer found in LEADTOOLS Version 19 not only make it possible to view and annotate raster and vector based file formats in the same control, they make it easy.
Digital health care is a booming industry all over the world and the benefits of electronically stored medical records and images are being recognized and adopted at an increasing rate every day. Its importance has even reached the level to which governments are handing out large sums of money to invest in and encourage the development of this infrastructure. One of the most important building blocks of digital health care is the DICOM standard that deals with images. This white paper will show how to use the LEADTOOLS DICOM SDK to break through these complexities with its programmer-friendly and powerful toolkit.
It goes without saying that the DICOM specifications are massive and can be difficult to implement on your own. There are a wide variety of products for software developers, end-users, and integrators that make DICOM and PACS more accessible and user-friendly. However, even among SDKs there are many features within the DICOM specifications that get overlooked or cast aside. One such feature is DICOM Media Creation Management. This white paper will demonstrate how to use the comprehensive DICOM and PACS functionality in LEADTOOLS to easily add DICOM Media Creation Management to your application.
Like many booming industries, audio and video streaming is supported by a large cast of technologies serving in a wide variety of roles from high-end military drones to home entertainment and everything in between. The cast takes the form of audio and video compression algorithms within codecs, multiplexers, demultiplexers, and the applications that bring them to life. Of these, MPEG-2 Transport Stream has emerged as one of the most versatile and widely used video streaming formats. This white paper will dive into the many advantages and uses for MPEG-2 Transport Stream and how to incorporate it into your application with LEADTOOLS Multimedia SDKs.
Electronic document archival has evolved far beyond the simple days of scanning a paper document and saving it as an image or PDF. Nowadays, many documents don't even start in physical form and could be one of many open or proprietary formats. Adding to the disparity caused by varying file formats is how and where files are stored. Many enterprises have their documents spread around numerous "data islands" including local computers, networked file shares, and cloud services. This white paper will explore how to take full advantage of PDF/A as your universal document storage format by using the state-of-the-art technology within LEADTOOLS Document Imaging SDKs.
Incorporating a digital Picture Archival and Communication System (PACS) is a must-have in today's health care industry for many reasons. Besides the obvious benefits to productivity, speed, collaboration, automation, and so on, there are many government grants and subsidies that providers can qualify for by showing Meaningful Use. The majority of requirements of doing so revolve around digitally capturing and presenting health care-related information to improve ease of use and accessibility for individuals, families, and health care workers. This white paper will show how LEADTOOLS Print to PACS can be used as a final cog in your digital migration and aid in the completion of Meaningful Use requirements.
If you have been involved in the development of a document management application or process, you have probably run across a requirement to add, or interface with, forms recognition. It is also likely you have been frustrated with the accuracy of the results. Forms recognition and processing is a complicated procedure with an infinite number of variables and factors contributing to the accuracy of the extracted fields. However, few variables carry as much weight or significance as form alignment.
Cloud services such as Google Drive continue to grow in popularity each year as a safe, secure, and convenient way to store and back up your documents, images, music, and other files. For users with a large amount of data in the cloud, searching and finding your files again can become problematic. Most search features are limited in their scope, and only take advantage of the file name or, for file formats such as PDF, the text within the file itself. Therefore some level of customization or enhancement may be necessary to take full advantage of your Google Drive cloud storage. You can use the LEADTOOLS PDF SDK to read and edit the file metadata, and then update the file's IndexableTextData property in Google Drive to enable custom keyword searching.
Countless companies rely on paper forms for gathering information from customers, patients, students, and the like. Automated forms recognition can be used on anything from a simple postcard to complex, multi-page tax forms to save time and money by increasing accuracy and reducing man-hours. However, large enterprises such as financial institutions, government agencies, and hospitals often deal with huge numbers of forms on a daily basis, causing unique problems which can be successfully and efficiently handled with good planning, form design, and the right software. By implementing a combination of multithreading, cloud computing, barcodes, and two-phase categorized recognition, a forms recognition and processing application built with LEADTOOLS can handle any large-scale scenario you can throw at it.
Forms recognition and processing is used all over the world to tackle a wide variety of tasks including classification, document archival, optical character recognition, and optical mark recognition. Out of those general categories, OMR is an oft misunderstood and underused feature in document imaging due to the time consuming nature of setting up OMR based forms and the difficulty of accurately detecting which OMR fields are filled on a scanned document. This white paper will discuss how to alleviate both of these common problems by developing an OMR forms recognition application with LEADTOOLS.
Document imaging is certainly saving trees and physical storage space, but in some situations it fails to save much time or hassle. Opting in to paperless statements or manually scanning paper documents yourself is a great way to archive all of your bills, invoices, financial statements, and the like. However, it still requires a fair amount of time and energy to thoughtfully organize the documents in your digital filing cabinet. Imagine being able to drop all of your scanned documents into a single folder and have all the work of moving and renaming the files in a logical, consistent manner done automatically. LEADTOOLS Forms Recognition and Processing fits the bill perfectly with its high-level, flexible, and powerful imaging libraries.
Google Drive is a wonderful service for storing, organizing, and sharing files such as documents, photos, and videos. However, TIFF and other raster image file formats can get easily lost because of the limited search capabilities. With LEADTOOLS, developers can use its OCR SDK to extract the text and then add it to the IndexableTextData for each item.
LEAD Technologies explores the different possibilities of developing mobile applications, why you should use HTML5, and how a LEADTOOLS SDK is the perfect solution for your multi-platform, zero-footprint mobile application.
Developing a PACS application is a major undertaking, and there are many different ways to go about creating it. LEAD Technologies realizes this and explores four different development options offered within LEADTOOLS Medical Imaging SDKs: DICOM Communication, PACS Framework, PACS Workstation Framework, and Medical Web Viewer Framework.