Imaging system for tongue diagnosis

Advancement in medical technology has developed more and more sophisticated equipments and medical treatments which have contributed much to mankind. Nevertheless, the eastern method of medical treatment, known as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), is still widely practice today by Chinese physicians. Tongue diagnosis is one of the four methods being used. The color, texture and coating of a human tongue carries abound of information on the health status of a person. This provides much information for the physician to use for accurate medical diagnosis. This report is aimed at building a prototype to capture tongue images using existing CCD cameras. These digital images will then undergo a series of image processing stages like overall color correction and data collection for every tongue regions using conventional Photoshop CS3 software. The author had automated these techniques which could greatly reduce the amount of time needed by the physician to process the tongue images. A few sets of tongue grid templates were made for the various shapes and sizes of tongues. The main advantage of this project is that the whole imaging system for tongue diagnosis is portable and easy to use for both the hardware and software.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering