It all helps and sticking your
tongue out at your smart phone is a great start in making medicine way more
accessible.
In the best of worlds coming soon
to a mall near you, we merely sit down in a testing device and hundreds of variables
get measured and correlated. It becomes likely
that ninety percent of all ailments get picked up early enough to prevent further
development.
This type of technology allows
valuable empirical insights to be applied uniformly and often. One does not need to understand the
biological pathway that produces subtle changes related to various conditions. In fact all that theory is sometimes grossly
misleading and distracting when it is enough to observe that a dog can smell
the presence of cancer in a person’s body.
I suspect that all medicine will
devolve into a automated diagnostic system that supports intervention that is
skillful and often subtle.
Tongue Analysis Software Uses Ancient Chinese Medicine to Warn of
Disease
ScienceDaily (May 26, 2012) — For 5,000 years, the Chinese have
used a system of medicine based on the flow and balance of positive and
negative energies in the body. In this system, the appearance of the tongue is
one of the measures used to classify the overall physical status of the body,
or zheng. Now, University
of Missouri
"Knowing your zheng classification can serve as a
pre-screening tool and help with preventive medicine," said Dong Xu, chair
of MU's computer science department in the College of Engineering
The software analyzes images based on the tongue's color and coating to
distinguish between tongues showing signs of "hot" or
"cold" zheng. Shades of red and yellow are associated with hot zheng,
whereas a white coating on the tongue is a sign of cold zheng.
"Hot and cold zheng doesn't refer directly to body
temperature," said Xu, who is also on the faculty of the Bond Life Sciences Center
For example, a person with cold zheng may feel chills and
coolness in the limbs and show a pale flushing of face. Their voice may have a
high pitch. Other symptoms of cold sheng are clear urine and loose stool. They
also may prefer hot foods and drinks and desire warm environments.
In Chinese traditional medicine both hot and cold zheng can
be symptoms of gastritis, an inflammation of the stomach lining frequently
caused by bacterial infection.
For the study, 263 gastritis patients and 48 healthy volunteers had
their tongues analyzed. The gastritis patients were classified by whether they
showed infection by a certain bacteria, known as Helicobacter pylori, as
well as the intensity of their gastritis symptoms. In addition, most of the
gastritis patients had been previously classified with either hot or coldzheng.
This allowed the researchers to verify the accuracy of the software's analysis.
"Our software was able to classify people based on their zhengstatus,"
said study co-author Ye Duan, associate professor of computer science at MU.
"As we continue to work on the software we hope to improve its
ability," Duan said. "Eventually everyone will be able to use this
tool at home using webcams or smartphone applications. That will allow them to
monitor their zheng and get an early warning about possible
ailments."
The study "Automated Tongue Feature Extraction for ZHENG
Classification in Traditional Chinese Medicine" was accepted for
publication in the journal Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative
Medicine. The study's first author was doctoral student Ratchadaporn
Kanawong and the second author was post-doctoral researcher Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi.
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