Digital tongue image analyses for health assessment

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), as an effective alternative medicine, utilizes tongue diagnosis as a major method to assess the patient's health status by examining the tongue's color, shape, and texture. Tongue images can also give the pre-disease indications without any significant disease symptoms, which provides a basis for preventive medicine and lifestyle adjustment. However, traditional tongue diagnosis has limitations, as the process may be subjective and inconsistent. Hence, computer-aided tongue diagnoses have a great potential to provide more consistent and objective health assessments. This paper reviewed the current trends in TCM tongue diagnosis, including tongue image acquisition hardware, tongue segmentation, feature extraction, color correction, tongue classification, and tongue diagnosis system. We also present a case of TCM constitution classification based on tongue images.