Tongue image analysis for appendicitis diagnosis

Medical diagnosis using the tongue is a unique and important diagnostic method of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, the clinical applications of tongue diagnosis have been limited due to two factors: (1) tongue diagnosis is usually based on the capacity of the eye for detailed discrimination; (2) the correctness of tongue diagnosis depends on the experience of physicians; and (3) traditional tongue diagnosis is always dedicated to the identification of syndromes other than diseases. To address these problems, in this paper, we present a tongue-computing model (TCoM) for the diagnosis of appendicitis based on quantitative measurements that include chromatic and textural metrics. These metrics are computed from true color tongue images by using appropriate techniques of image processing. Applying our approach to clinical tongue images, the experimental results are encouraging.