Advances in automated tongue diagnosis techniques

Area of Science:

• Integrative Medicine
• Medical Imaging
• Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare

Background:

• Tongue diagnosis is a key component of traditional oriental medicine.
• Computerized tongue diagnosis (CTD) offers a noninvasive auxiliary diagnostic method.
• Existing CTD research lacks comprehensive surveys integrating modern healthcare trends.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review recent advances in computerized tongue diagnosis.
• To evaluate existing works on various aspects of CTD, including preprocessing, detection, segmentation, feature extraction, and analysis within Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
• To identify research gaps and propose a conceptual framework for an automated tongue diagnostic system on mobile platforms.

Main Methods:

• Literature review of computerized tongue diagnosis.
• Exploration of algorithms used in tongue diagnosis.
• Analysis of current trends and global healthcare requirements.

Main Results:

• Significant progress has been made in various aspects of automated tongue diagnosis (ATD).
• There is a need for integrated surveys that bridge traditional diagnostic methods with current healthcare technologies.
• Current ATD systems have limitations and research gaps that need addressing.

Conclusions:

• Tongue diagnosis is a valuable, noninvasive tool supporting primary healthcare.
• A conceptual framework for a mobile-enabled automated tongue diagnostic system is proposed.
• This framework aims to integrate tongue diagnosis with future point-of-care health systems.