Updating an ancient form of health diagnosis with modern machine learning, researchers have developed a remarkable system that can reveal a range of medical conditions just by looking at your tongue. Tests have shown its near-perfect accuracy.
Doctors have been wanting to see your tongue for thousands of years. And for good reason. The color and condition of your tongue can actually reveal a lot about what’s going on in the rest of your body. While the technique seems to have gained popularity in Western medicine in the 17th century, it’s actually been used in traditional Chinese medicine since around 1115.
Understanding the importance of good language analysis, researchers from the Central Technical University (MTU) in Iraq and the University of South Australia (UniSA) decided to see if they could standardize things a bit and bring more accuracy to the app.
They trained a machine learning system on 5,260 tongue images taken in a wide range of lighting conditions. They also fed it a series of images from individuals with known health conditions, such as asthma, diabetes, and anemia. They then tested the system by placing a camera 20cm (7.8in) away from the patient’s tongue and asked it to produce a diagnosis. It was 98% accurate and presented its results in real time.
“The colour, shape and thickness of the tongue can reveal a range of health issues,” said MTU and UniSA professor Ali Al-Naji, who led the study. “Typically, people with diabetes have a yellow tongue; cancer patients have a purple tongue with a thick oily coating; and patients with acute stroke have an unusually red tongue. A white tongue may indicate anaemia; people with severe cases of COVID-19 are likely to have a dark red tongue; and an indigo or purple tongue indicates vascular and gastrointestinal problems or asthma.”
Now that we know you're going to look, we thought we'd mention that, according to Harvard Health, a healthy tongue should be symmetrical, more or less pale pink, and have a white coating on it, which is fine. In Mediterranean, Asian, and African populations, a healthy tongue can also have a slightly purplish or brownish hue. If anything else, you may want to head to your doctor's office to get it checked out.
Soon, getting a tongue-based diagnosis could be as simple as looking into your smartphone’s camera, Al-Naji said, technology that could be easily integrated into smartphones in the future. Such a test could also be used as a way to screen for COVID cases, as a 2022 study in Ukraine found that 99% of severe cases of the virus had dark red tongues.
The research was published in the journal Technologies.
Source: University of South Australia via EurekAlert