Sensors (Jun 2024)

S5Utis: Structured State-Space Sequence SegNeXt UNet-like Tongue Image Segmentation in Traditional Chinese Medicine

  • Donglei Song,
  • Hongda Zhang,
  • Lida Shi,
  • Hao Xu,
  • Ying Xu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s24134046
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 24, no. 13
p. 4046

Abstract

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Intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine can provide people with a convenient way to participate in daily health care. The ease of acceptance of Traditional Chinese Medicine is also a major advantage in promoting health management. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, tongue imaging is an important step in the examination process. The segmentation and processing of the tongue image directly affects the results of intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnosis. As intelligent Traditional Chinese Medicine continues to develop, remote diagnosis and patient participation will play important roles. Smartphone sensor cameras can provide irreplaceable data collection capabilities in enhancing interaction in smart Traditional Chinese Medicine. However, these factors lead to differences in the size and quality of the captured images due to factors such as differences in shooting equipment, professionalism of the photographer, and the subject’s cooperation. Most current tongue image segmentation algorithms are based on data collected by professional tongue diagnosis instruments in standard environments, and are not able to demonstrate the tongue image segmentation effect in complex environments. Therefore, we propose a segmentation algorithm for tongue images collected in complex multi-device and multi-user environments. We use convolutional attention and extend state space models to the 2D environment in the encoder. Then, cross-layer connection fusion is used in the decoder part to fuse shallow texture and deep semantic features. Through segmentation experiments on tongue image datasets collected by patients and doctors in real-world settings, our algorithm significantly improves segmentation performance and accuracy.

Keywords