This technology could be amazing!
Iraqi and Australian researchers say they have developed a computer algorithm that can analyze a person's tongue colour to detect their health condition in real time with 98% accuracy.
“Typically, people with diabetes have a yellow tongue, people with cancer have a purple tongue with a thick oily layer, and people with acute stroke have an abnormally shaped red tongue,” explained lead study author Ali Alnaji, who teaches at Baghdad's Middle University of Technology and the University of South Australia.
Examining the tongue to detect signs of disease has long been common in Chinese medicine.
“A white tongue can be a sign of anemia. People with severe COVID-19 are more likely to have a bright red tongue,” Al Naji continued. “An indigo or violet tongue indicates vascular or gastrointestinal problems, or asthma.”
Al Naji says his proposed imaging system mimics the traditional Chinese medicine practice of examining the tongue to find signs of disease.
In the study, patients sat about eight inches away from a laptop equipped with a webcam to take pictures of their tongues.
The researchers used 5,260 images to train an artificial intelligence model that identifies tongue color and its corresponding condition. They then tested it on 60 images of tongues taken from two teaching hospitals in the Middle East.
Patients sat about eight inches away from a laptop with a webcam that took pictures of their tongues, and the program was able to identify the disease in nearly all cases.
The research results were published in the journal Technologies.
Study co-author Javan Shaar, a professor at the University of South Australia, said the technology could eventually be used in smartphone apps that can diagnose diseases such as diabetes, stroke, anaemia, asthma, liver and gallbladder problems and COVID-19.
“These results confirm that computerized tongue analysis is a safe, efficient, easy-to-use and affordable disease screening method that supports modern methods in a centuries-old practice,” Chall said.
There are still some hurdles to overcome, including patient reluctance to provide data and reflections captured by the camera that could mislead the algorithm.
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Doctors can learn a lot about a patient's health by looking at their tongue.
And a 2023 review of five years' worth of AI tongue image analysis raised concerns that there was no definitive dataset, forcing researchers to build their own.
However, the technology was found to be of “great value” in diagnosing and treating disease.
