How does it work?
The computer algorithm can detect diseases just by looking at your tongue.
“Typically, diabetics have a yellow tongue, cancer patients have a purple tongue with a thick, fatty coating, and patients with an acute stroke have an unusually shaped red tongue,” lead study author Ali Al-Naji, who teaches at the Middle Technical University in Baghdad and the University of South Australia, told the New York Post. The study was published in the journal Technologies.
“The most important features of this examination include the color of the tongue, the color of the tongue coating, the shape of the tongue, the depth of the coating, the moisture in the oral cavity, tongue clefts, bruises, red spots and tooth marks,” the researchers explained.
Of utmost importance is the color of the tongue, they said, adding that a healthy tongue is usually pink in color and has a thin white coating.
The AI model replicates a 2,000-year-old technique from traditional Chinese medicine, according to which:
- Yellow coating on the tongue indicates diabetes mellitus, in some cases it can also be blue with yellow coating.
- A purple tongue with a thick layer of fat can be cancer
- Abnormally shaped red tongue can cause acute stroke
- A white tongue can indicate chills syndrome or iron deficiency in the blood
- A yellow tongue indicates an increased body temperature as well as liver and gallbladder disease.
- Indigo or purple tongue may be due to vascular or gastrointestinal problems
- Appendicitis can cause changes to the outside of the tongue
- Depending on the intensity of the bacterial or viral COVID-19 infection, the tongue may be pale pink in mild cases, purple in moderate cases, and deep red (burgundy) in severe cases.
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“In this study, a webcam was used to capture real-time images of the tongue using MATLAB GUI software. The proposed system was tested on 60 images of patients and healthy subjects taken in real time. The diagnostic accuracy reached 96.6%,” the researchers explained.
