Objectification of Tongue Diagnosis in Traditional Medicine, Data Analysis, and Study Application

Summary

The present study employed U-Net and other deep learning algorithms to segment a tongue image and compared the segmentation results to investigate the objectification of tongue diagnosis.

Abstract

Tongue diagnosis is an essential technique of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) diagnosis, and the need for objectifying tongue images through image processing technology is growing. The present study provides an overview of the progress made in tongue objectification over the past decade and compares segmentation models. Various deep learning models are constructed to verify and compare algorithms using real tongue image sets. The strengths and weaknesses of each model are analyzed. The findings indicate that the U-Net algorithm outperforms other models regarding precision accuracy (PA), recall, and mean intersection over union (MIoU) metrics. However, despite the significant progress in tongue image acquisition and processing, a uniform standard for objectifying tongue diagnosis has yet to be established. To facilitate the widespread application of tongue images captured using mobile devices in tongue diagnosis objectification, further research could address the challenges posed by tongue images captured in complex environments.

Introduction

Tongue observation is a widely utilized technique in traditional Chinese ethnic medicine (TCM). The color and shape of the tongue can reflect the physical condition and various disease properties, severities, and prognoses. For instance, in traditional Hmong medicine, the tongue's color is used to identify body temperature e.g., a red or purple tongue indicates pathological factors related to heat. In Tibetan medicine, a condition is judged by observing the tongue of a patient, paying attention to the color, shape, and moisture of the mucus. For instance, the tongues of patients with Heyi disease become red and rough or black and dry

Protocol

This study has been approved by the National Natural Science Foundation of China project, Constructing Dynamic Change rules of TCM Facial image Based on Association Analysis. The ethics approval number is 2021KL-027, and the ethics committee has approved the clinical study to be carried out in accordance with the approved documents which include clinical research protocol (2021.04.12, V2.0), informed consent (2021.04.12, V2.0), subject recruitment materials (2021.04.12, V2.0), study cases and/or case reports, subject diary cards and other questionnaires (2021.04.12, V2.0), a list of participants in the clinical trial, research project approval, etc. Informed consent f....

Results

For the comparison results, see Figure 12, Figure 13, and Table 1, where the environment constructed by this study uses the same samples to train and test the algorithm model. MIoU indicator: U-Net > Seg-Net > PSPNet > DeeplabV3; MPA indicator: U-Net > Seg-Net > PSPNet > DeeplabV3; precision indicator: U-Net > Seg-Net > DeeplabV3 > PSPNet; recall: U-Net > Seg-Net > PSPNet > DeeplabV3. The larger the index valu.......

Discussion

Based on the comparison results presented above, it is evident that the characteristics of the four algorithms under consideration are varied, and their distinct advantages and disadvantages are described below. The U-Net structure, based on the modification and expansion of a full convolution network, can obtain contextual information and precise positioning through a contracting path and a symmetrical expanding path. By classifying each pixel point, this algorithm achieves a higher segmentation accuracy and segments th.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
CPU	Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9700K
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti (8192MB)
Operating systems	Microsoft Windows 10 Professional Edition (64-bit)
Programming language	Python
RAM	16G