For centuries doctors have used the tongue as an indicator for health conditions. Most people will have been asked to open wide and say aah during a visit to the surgery at some point as part of their diagnosis.
Now engineers have developed a computer programme which can do the job – and with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) it can spot what is wrong 98% of the time. The team used skills from Chinese medicine going back more than 2,000 years.
The researchers from Middle Technical University in Iraq and the University of South Australia carried out a series of experiments in which they used 5,260 images to train machine learning algorithms to identify tongue colour.
A total of 60 images of tongues from patients with a variety of health conditions were then supplied by two teaching hospitals in the Middle East. The AI model matched the tongue colour with the correct disease in almost every case.
A new paper published in Technologies outlines how the proposed system analyses tongue colour to provide on-the-spot diagnosis, confirming that AI holds the key to many advances in medicine.
Senior author, MTU and UniSA Adjunct Associate Professor Ali Al-Naji, explained how the AI is replicating a 2000-year-old practice from traditional Chinese medicine in which the tongue is examined for signs of disease.
He said: “The colour, shape and thickness of the tongue can reveal a litany of health conditions.
What does the colour of your tongue show?
According to Professor Al-Naji the tongue can signal a number of conditions. He said: “Typically, people with diabetes have a yellow tongue; cancer patients a purple tongue with a thick greasy coating; and acute stroke patients present with an unusually shaped red tongue.
A white tongue can indicate anaemia; people with severe cases of COVID-19 are likely to have a deep red tongue; and an indigo or violet coloured tongue indicates vascular and gastrointestinal issues or asthma.” In the study, cameras placed 20 centimetres from a patient captured their tongue colour and the imaging system predicted their health condition in real time.
Co-author of the study, UniSA Professor Javaan Chahl, says that down the track, a smartphone will be used to diagnose disease in this way. He said: “These results confirm that computerised tongue analysis is a secure, efficient, user friendly and affordable method for disease screening that backs up modern methods with a centuries-old practice.”