Automatic Tongue Diagnosis System

Tongue diagnosis tops the four diagnoses and hence is crucial to the inspection diagnosis in Chinese Medicine. Clinically, doctors mostly rely on their own knowledge and experience when determining major lesions of a patient by observing the coloration, overall modalities, and volume of sputum of different parts of the tongue. Different doctors may come to drastically different judgments on the same tongue presentation with little overlap. Therefore, it is important to develop scientific methods that can help doctors diagnose based on standardized differentiation procedures and render reliable diagnoses in order to enhance the clinical application value of Chinese Medicine. The computerized automatic capture of characteristics shown on the images of the surface and the back of the tongue comprises breakup of the tongue image and capture of the tongue characteristics. And that, tongue characteristics include the shape, fur, body, and fluid. Sublingual collateral vessels are used to examine traits of veins on the back of the tongue and detect the length, width, number of branches, solidness, and color. By far, 29 images of the surface of the tongue and 69 images of the back of the tongue have been collected.