MediTables

Localizing structured layout components such as tables is an important task in document image analysis. Numerous layout datasets with document images from various domains exist. However, healthcare and medical documents represent a crucial domain that has not been included so far. To address this gap, we contribute MediTables, a new dataset of 200 diverse medical document images with multi-category table annotations. Meditables contains a wide range of medical document images with variety in capture quality, layouts, skew, occlusion and illumination. The dataset images include pathology, diagnostic and hospital-related reports. In addition to document diversity, the dataset includes implicitly structured tables that are typically not present in other datasets. We benchmark state of the art table localization approaches on the MediTables dataset and introduce a custom-designed U-Net which exhibits robust performance while being drastically smaller in size compared to strong baselines. Our annotated dataset and models represent a useful first step towards the development of focused systems for medical document image analytics, a domain that mandates robust systems for reliable information retrieval.