For 3,000 years, traditional Chinese doctors have looked at discoloured tongues, lank hair, and skin blemishes, to diagnose conditions from diabetes to brain disease - all based on experience and a gut instinct.
But now Polytechnic University's researchers are creating a digitalised computer data base of Chinese medicine practice to help diagnoses and to bring Chinese medicine to an international market.
'The largest problem that has stunted the development of Chinese medicine is that it's very subjective,' said PolyU's computing professor David Zhang Dapeng, who spearheaded the campaign for Chinese medical examination machines, at a showcase of his work yesterday. 'Diagnoses vary between different Chinese doctors.'
Zhang believes the subjectivity of Chinese medicine keeps many in the international community visiting Western doctors.
'People in the West think that Chinese medicine is mysterious,' Zhang said. 'We want to explain traditional Chinese medicine to the West. We want to bring what practitioners see to the electronic age.'
Zhang's Automated Tongue Image Acquisition and Analysis System captures images of the patient's tongue and compares it with other tongue images in its database. The system assesses the tongue's colour, texture, substance and shape, offering the doctor a result.
It can be used, he says, to help in the diagnosis of diabetes, cardiovascular illness, brain disease, pancreatitis, appendicitis and acute and chronic bronchitis with an average accuracy of 85 per cent.