Tongue diagnosis is an important diagnostic method for
evaluating the condition of internal organ by looking at
the image of tongue . However, due to its qualitative, subjective and experience-based nature, traditional tongue diagnosis has a very limited application in clinical medicine. Moreover, traditional tongue diagnosis is always concerned with the identification of syndromes rather than with the connection between tongue abnormal appearances and diseases. This is not well understood in Western medicine, thus greatly obstruct its wider use in the world. In this paper, we present a novel computerized tongue inspection method aiming to address these problems. First, two kinds of quantitative features, chromatic and textural measures, are extracted from tongue images by using popular
digital image processing techniques. Then, SOM
Kohonen are employed to model the relationship
between these quantitative features and diseases. The
effectiveness of the method is tested on 35 patients affected by Diabetes Mellitus as well as other 30 healthy volunteers, and the diagnostic results predicted by the previously trained SOM Kohonen classifiers are compared with the HOMA-B
