A new type of health AI assistant can accurately detect health conditions just by looking at your tongue. Medical researchers designed the assistant to look for specific colors and conditions on the tongue. The algorithm behind the AI has proven so effective that it can accurately detect the conditions the patient is suffering from 98 percent of the time.
The new AI is part of the research detailed in a paper published in the journal Technologies. The researchers used 60 photos gathered from teaching hospitals in the Middle East and fed them into the algorithm. The photos were all taken from various patients, all of which were suffering from different conditions like COVID-19 and even gastrointestinal issues.
In these tests, the AI health assistant was able to accurately detect which condition the patient was suffering from just by examining the color of their tongue. But creating this system was not an easy job. The researchers first took 5,200 photos of patients’ tongues and then added the corresponding information about their diagnoses using six separate ML algorithms.
This allowed them to accurately predict the tongue color under any lighting condition, the paper reports. The researchers say that the color, thickness, and shape of the tongue can reveal a “litany of health conditions,” and building an AI capable of understanding that will help doctors discover and diagnose conditions much more reliably.
While the process relies on a health AI assistant to do the heavy lifting, it actually builds on medicine practices that date back centuries, the researchers note in their paper. Being able to understand the condition of the tongue can help us understand what is going on in a patient’s body without needing to invade their privacy any more than required, and this kind of medical AI will only make that even easier.