DoggyTongue: Automate Tongue Segmentation for TCM Diagnosis

The diagnosis of the western medicine often relies on intricate and expensive equipment. Instead, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) relies on four methods and one of them (inspection) investigates various visual features to understand the patient's health condition. A lot of work were proposed to digitize the process and the first step is to segment the tongue from a given photo. In this paper, we present DoggyTongue, a system to automate this tongue segmentation process. The system contains a mobile application for taking photos and presenting segmented results, and a backend server with machine learning algorithms to perform tongue segmentation. The combination of a mobile application and machine learning algorithms not only has a potential to support TCM diagnosis, but it also allows the public to easily use it. The results of our work have shown a promising direction to apply mobile and web engineering into the TCM domain.