A deep tongue image features analysis model for medical application

With the improvement of people's living standards, there is no doubt that people are paying more and more attention to their health. However, shortage of medical resources is a critical global problem. As a result, an intelligent prognostics system has a great potential to play important roles in computer aided diagnosis. Numerous papers reported that tongue features have been closely related to a human's state. Among them, the majority of the existing tongue image analyses and classification methods are based on the low-level features, which may not provide a holistic view of the tongue. Inspired by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), we propose a deep tongue image feature analysis system to extract unbiased features and reduce human labor for tongue diagnosis. With the unbalanced sample distribution, it is hard to form a balanced classification model based on feature representations obtained by existing low-level and high-level methods. Our proposed deep tongue image feature analysis model learns high-level features and provide more classification information during training time, which may result in higher accuracy when predicting testing samples. We tested the proposed system on a set of 267 gastritis patients, and a control group of 48 healthy volunteers (labeled according to Western medical practices). Test results show that the proposed deep tongue image feature analysis model can classify a given tongue image into healthy and diseased state with an average accuracy of 91.49%, which demonstrates the relationship between human body's state and its deep tongue image features.