Objective assessment of blood stasis using computerized inspection of sublingual veins.

In traditional Chinese tongue diagnosis, inspection of the sublingual veins has been developed as a new diagnostic examination method especially for determining blood stasis. The main purpose of this research is to develop a computerized inspection system, used to quantitatively extract the chromatic and geometrical properties of sublingual veins. A method based on color equalization is presented to assist the image segmentation of sublingual veins. Color image analysis techniques are applied to extract the length, width, area and color information from sublingual veins. Experimental results are compared with the visual inspection of physicians. The severity of blood stasis was classified into three groups: normal, moderate and pronounced. Each group consisted of eight subjects. The overall recognition rate is 87.5% in the leaving-one-out classification using the developed system.