Qunsheng Ruan

Shan Cao, Qunsheng Ruan, Linjian Ma

Tongue segmentation serves as the primary step in automated TCM tongue diagnosis, which plays a significant role in the diagnostic results. Currently, numerous deep learning based methods have achieved promising results. However, when confronted with tongue images that differ from the training set or possess challenging backgrounds, these methods demonstrate limited performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a universal tongue segmentation model named TongueSAM based on SAM (Segment Anything Model). SAM is a large-scale pretrained interactive segmentation model known for its powerful zero-shot generalization capability. Applying SAM to tongue segmentation leverages its learned prior knowledge from natural images, enabling the achievement of zero-shot segmentation for various types of tongue images. In this study, a Prompt Generator based on object detection is integrated into SAM to enable an end-to-end automated tongue segmentation method. Experiments demonstrate that TongueSAM achieves exceptional performance across various of tongue segmentation datasets, particularly under zero-shot. Even when dealing with challenging background tongue images, TongueSAM achieves a mIoU of 95.23\% under zero-shot conditions, surpassing other segmentation methods. As far as we know, this is the first application of large-scale pretrained model for tongue segmentation. The project mentioned in this paper is currently publicly available.

Shan Cao, Qunsheng Ruan, Qingfeng Wu et al.

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a clinicopathological syndrome characterized by hepatic steatosis resulting from the exclusion of alcohol and other identifiable liver-damaging factors. It has emerged as a leading cause of chronic liver disease worldwide. Currently, the conventional methods for NAFLD detection are expensive and not suitable for users to perform daily diagnostics. To address this issue, this study proposes a non-invasive and interpretable NAFLD diagnostic method, the required user-provided indicators are only Gender, Age, Height, Weight, Waist Circumference, Hip Circumference, and tongue image. This method involves merging patients' physiological indicators with tongue features, which are then input into a fusion network named SelectorNet. SelectorNet combines attention mechanisms with feature selection mechanisms, enabling it to autonomously learn the ability to select important features. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 77.22\% using only non-invasive data, and it also provides compelling interpretability matrices. This study contributes to the early diagnosis of NAFLD and the intelligent advancement of TCM tongue diagnosis. The project mentioned in this paper is currently publicly available.