This paper presents a special symbol recognition system that incorporates the result of an OCR to recognize the special symbols those not handled by the current commercial OCR systems. Given a document image and the OCR out-put, we first refine the character coordinates produced by the OCR. Then, the special symbols are distinguished from the normal characters. Finally, we compute the features from the special symbol sub-images and a supervised classifier is used to assign the sub-images to one of the predefined special symbol categories. The system was tested on 5516 images from the National Library of Medicine. The evaluation results are reported in the paper.