MIRAGE: Multimodal Identification and Recognition of Annotations in Indian General Prescriptions

Hospitals generate thousands of handwritten prescriptions, a practice that remains prevalent despite the availability of Electronic Medical Records (EMR). This method of record-keeping hinders the examination of long-term medication effects, impedes statistical analysis, and makes the retrieval of records challenging. Handwritten prescriptions pose a unique challenge, requiring specialized data for training models to recognize medications and their patterns of recommendation. While current handwriting recognition approaches typically employ 2-D LSTMs, recent studies have explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Building on this approach, we focus on extracting medication names from medical records. Our methodology MIRAGE (Multimodal Identification and Recognition of Annotations in indian GEneral prescriptions) involves fine-tuning the LLaVA 1.6 and Idefics2 models. Our research utilizes a dataset provided by Medyug Technology, consisting of 743,118 fully annotated high-resolution simulated medical records from 1,133 doctors across India. We demonstrate that our methodology exhibits 82% accuracy in medication name and dosage extraction. We provide a detailed account of our research methodology and results, notes about HWR with Multimodal LLMs, and release a small dataset of 100 medical records with labels.