Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Changhua Christian Hospital, Changhua 500, Taiwan.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2012;2012:505063. doi: 10.1155/2012/505063. Epub 2012 Aug 8.
Tongue diagnosis is an important practice in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for diagnosing diseases before determining proper means of treatments. Traditionally, it depends solely on personal knowledge and experience of the practitioner, thereby being criticized as lacking of objectivity. Currently, no research regarding intra- and inter-agreements of automatic tongue diagnosis system (ATDS) and TCM doctors has been conducted. In this study, the ATDS is developed to extract a variety of tongue features and provide practitioners with objective information to assist diagnoses. To evaluate the ATDS clinical stability, 2 sets of tongue images taken 1 hour apart from 20 patients with possible variations in lighting and extruding tongue, are employed to investigate intra-agreement of the ATDS, intra-agreement of the TCM doctors, and the inter-agreement between the ATDS and TCM doctors. The ATDS is shown to be more consistent with significantly higher intra-agreement than the TCM doctors (kappa value: 0.93 ± 0.06 versus 0.64 ± 0.13) with P < 0.001 (Student's t-test). Inter-agreements between the ATDS and TCM doctors, as well as among the TCM doctors are both moderate. The high agreement of the ATDS can provide objective and reliable tongue features to facilitate doctor in making effective observation and diagnosis of specific diseases.
舌诊是中医诊断疾病、确定治疗方法的重要方法。传统上,它完全依赖于医生的个人知识和经验,因此被批评为缺乏客观性。目前,尚未有关于自动舌诊系统(ATDS)和中医医生的内部和外部一致性的研究。本研究开发了 ATDS 以提取各种舌特征,并为医生提供客观信息以辅助诊断。为了评估 ATDS 的临床稳定性,我们对 20 名可能存在光线和伸舌变化的患者进行了 1 小时间隔的两次舌图像采集,以研究 ATDS 的内部一致性、中医医生的内部一致性以及 ATDS 和中医医生之间的外部一致性。结果表明,ATDS 的一致性显著高于中医医生(kappa 值:0.93 ± 0.06 与 0.64 ± 0.13),P < 0.001(Student's t 检验)。ATDS 与中医医生之间以及中医医生之间的一致性都处于中等水平。ATDS 的高度一致性可以提供客观可靠的舌特征,有助于医生有效观察和诊断特定疾病。