Baghdad: Experts from Iraq and Australia have developed an AI technology that can diagnose diseases by looking at the tongue.
Researchers in Iraq and Australia say they have developed a computer algorithm that can detect a person’s medical condition with 98 percent accuracy by analyzing the color of their tongue.
“People with diabetes usually have a yellow tongue,” said Ali Al-Naji, senior author and researcher at the Middle Technical University of Baghdad and the University of South Australia. Cancer patients have a purple tongue with a thick fatty coating and patients with severe stroke have an abnormally shaped red tongue.
On the other hand, a white tongue can indicate anemia. People who have severe cases of COVID-19 are likely to have a deep red tongue.
Similarly, an indigo or violet colored tongue indicates vascular and gastrointestinal problems or asthma.
Al-Naji said his proposed AI imaging system mimics traditional Chinese medicine of examining the tongue for signs of disease.
An artificial intelligence model was fed data from more than 5,200 images to identify the color of the tongue and the corresponding state. The researchers tested this with 60 images of tongues from two hospitals in the Middle East.
