Design and Implementation of the Traditional Chinese Medicine Constitution System Based on the Diagnosis of Tongue and Consultation

• Main Authors: Ye Yuan, Wei Liao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Traditional Chinese medicine; constitution identification; tongue image; sentence similarity; question answering
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9309036/

The standardization and digitalization of nine constitutions of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) have promoted the development of TCM automation. The keys to constitution identification are tongue diagnosis and consultation diagnosis. In this paper, a tongue detection method based on the combination of the histogram of oriented gradients (HOG) and the support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. To separate the tongue body and tongue coating, a k-means segmentation method based on the Lab color space is proposed. Based on the clustering analysis of the difference between the color components of the tongue body and tongue coating in the Lab color space, the separation is realized. Thus, the relationship between the tongue image and constitution can be analyzed. The method for consultation diagnosis is divided into a questionnaire scale and a question answering system. The questionnaire includes 29 quantified items with corresponding weights and answer scores, so the final score of each type of constitution is calculated. The final constitution type is determined on the basis of the scores of both diagnoses. In addition, the key of question answering system is text similarity calculation. First, a sentence similarity calculation method combining the n-gram language model and word2vec is proposed. Then, a multifeature fusion sentence similarity calculation method combining the Word Mover's Distance (WMD) and editing distance is proposed. Finally, the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method, and a constitution identification application is developed based on the content of this paper.