Tongue Color Analysis and Diseases Detection Based on a Computer Vision System

Abstract

The tongue reflects the abnormal condition and behavior of the internal organs of the body, such as problems of the heart, liver, pancreas, stomach, intestines, blood diseases and others, which lead to changes in some of the features and characteristics of the tongue. The most important of these is tongue color, which can be adopted as a biometric that can be used in Computerized Tongue Diagnostic Systems (CTDS). Quantitative diagnosis of the tongue requires some devices, including image acquisition devices such as cameras, light sources, filters, color checkers, image analysis and processing devices through the application of some algorithms or image processing and color correction software, as well as a computer. This study proposes a real-time imaging system to analyze tongue color and diagnose diseases using a webcam under specific conditions. The proposed system was designed in a Matlab GUI environment. After testing the system on a data set of more than 100 images, the preliminary results showed that the proposed system gives a disease diagnosis with an accuracy rate of no less than 86.667%. The proposed system contributed to the diagnosis of several diseases in real time, with an accuracy of 95.45%, with ease of use, implementation and low cost. This gives impetus to further studies to apply computerized diagnosis in medical applications, to enhance the medical reality, monitor patient health, and make an accurate diagnosis.