Takeo Igarashi

Generating Graphical Reports on Cardiac Catheterization

Electronic medical recording systems [1-4] have become widespread due to the improve‐ ment in hardware performance and user interfaces. Some recent systems are designed to support doctor–patient communication using a tablet PC [5-6]. However, usability is still an issue and medical professionals need more such user-friendly interfaces. To make these sys‐ tems accessible to inexperienced users and to reduce the overhead of data entry, we have been developing various pen-based electronic medical recording systems [7-8]. Pen-based computing is an active research area for both user interfaces and computer graphics. Our work is based on recent advances in this area, especially the freeform user interfaces pro‐ posed by Igarashi [9]. Using this approach, the user draws freehand lines on the screen as‐ sisted by the system, and the result is directly stored as a vector image. Our systems feature special purpose functions for pen input including three-dimensional (3D) sketching, useridentification, and handwritten character recognition and search [8]. They are designed to help medical professionals to think more freely when working on difficult problems without being constrained by cumbersome interfaces.