Zhou Jianguo, Li Shangxuan, Wang Xuesong, Yang Zizhu, Hou Xinyuan, Lai Wei, Zhao Shifeng, Deng Qingqiong, Zhou Wu
School of Medical Information Engineering, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, China.
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
Front Physiol. 2022 Apr 12;13:847267. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2022.847267. eCollection 2022.
The recognition of tooth-marked tongues has important value for clinical diagnosis of traditional Chinese medicine. Tooth-marked tongue is often related to spleen deficiency, cold dampness, sputum, effusion, and blood stasis. The clinical manifestations of patients with tooth-marked tongue include loss of appetite, borborygmus, gastric distention, and loose stool. Traditional clinical tooth-marked tongue recognition is conducted subjectively based on the doctor's visual observation, and its performance is affected by the doctor's subjectivity, experience, and environmental lighting changes. In addition, the tooth marks typically have various shapes and colors on the tongue, which make it very challenging for doctors to identify tooth marks. The existing methods based on deep learning have made great progress for tooth-marked tongue recognition, but there are still shortcomings such as requiring a large amount of manual labeling of tooth marks, inability to detect and locate the tooth marks, and not conducive to clinical diagnosis and interpretation. In this study, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network for tooth-marked tongue recognition based on weakly supervised learning. Note that the deep neural network only requires image-level annotations of tooth-marked or non-tooth marked tongues. In this method, a deep neural network is trained to classify tooth-marked tongues with the image-level annotations. Then, a weakly supervised tooth-mark detection network (WSTDN) as an architecture variant of the pre-trained deep neural network is proposed for the tooth-marked region detection. Finally, the WSTDN is re-trained and fine-tuned using only the image-level annotations to simultaneously realize the classification of the tooth-marked tongue and the positioning of the tooth-marked region. Experimental results of clinical tongue images demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method compared with previously reported deep learning methods for tooth-marked tongue recognition. The proposed tooth-marked tongue recognition model may provide important syndrome diagnosis and efficacy evaluation methods, and contribute to the understanding of ethnopharmacological mechanisms.
齿痕舌的识别对于中医临床诊断具有重要价值。齿痕舌常与脾虚、寒湿、痰湿、水饮、血瘀等有关。齿痕舌患者的临床表现包括食欲不振、肠鸣、胃胀和大便溏薄。传统临床齿痕舌识别是基于医生的视觉观察进行主观判断的,其性能受医生主观性、经验和环境光照变化的影响。此外,齿痕在舌头上通常有各种形状和颜色,这使得医生识别齿痕非常具有挑战性。现有的基于深度学习的方法在齿痕舌识别方面取得了很大进展,但仍存在需要大量齿痕人工标注、无法检测和定位齿痕以及不利于临床诊断和解释等缺点。在本研究中,我们提出了一种基于弱监督学习的用于齿痕舌识别的端到端深度神经网络。需要注意的是,该深度神经网络仅需要齿痕舌或非齿痕舌的图像级标注。在这种方法中,利用图像级标注训练深度神经网络对齿痕舌进行分类。然后,提出了一种弱监督齿痕检测网络(WSTDN)作为预训练深度神经网络的架构变体用于齿痕区域检测。最后,仅使用图像级标注对WSTDN进行重新训练和微调,以同时实现齿痕舌的分类和齿痕区域的定位。临床舌图像的实验结果表明,与先前报道的用于齿痕舌识别的深度学习方法相比,所提方法具有优越性。所提出的齿痕舌识别模型可能提供重要的证候诊断和疗效评估方法,并有助于理解民族药理学机制。
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