Tongue texture may contribute to the assessment of malignant risk of thyroid nodules

In the present study, it was aimed to evaluate whether there is an objective tongue image indicator that could be used to evaluate malignant risk of thyroid nodules through a cross sectional study. From December 2018 to December 2020, the TFDA-1 digital tongue-face diagnostic instrument was used to collect the tongue images. TDAS 2.0 software was used for tongue image analysis. A standardized database was constructed by combining patient physical examination results and tongue image analysis results. The relationship between tongue image index and TI-RADS classification of thyroid nodules was tested. A total of 5,900 cases were collected and 4,615 cases were included in the present study after excluding 154 cases due to incomplete information, 1,221 cases with thyroid nodules were separated into 417 cases TI-RADS 2 group, 693 cases in TI-RADS 3 group and 111 cases in TI-RADS 4 group. Without considering confounding factors, tongue image indexes zhiCon, zhiASM, zhiENT, zhiMEAN, zhiClrB, zhiClrR, zhiClrG, zhiClrI, zhiClrL and zhiClrY were significantly different among the three groups (P<0.05). Excluding the influence of age, sex, body mass index, smoking and drinking, the results of one-way variance linear trend analysis showed that the values of zhiCon, zhiENT and zhiMEAN increased with the increasing TI-RADS category, while the values of zhiASM decreased with the increase of TI-RADS category. Tongue texture index may be helpful for differentiating the benign and malignant of thyroid nodules.