ROC-Boosting: A Feature Selection Method for Health Identification Using Tongue Image

Objective. To select significant Haar-like features extracted from tongue images for health identification. Materials and Methods. 1,322 tongue cases were included in this study. Health information and tongue images of each case were collected. Cases were classified into the following groups: group containing 148 cases diagnosed as health; group containing 332 cases diagnosed as ill based on health information, even though tongue image is normal; and group containing 842 cases diagnosed as ill. Haar-like features were extracted from tongue images. Then, we proposed a new boosting method in the ROC space for selecting significant features from the features extracted from these images. Results. A total of 27 features were obtained from groups A, B, and C. Seven features were selected from groups A and B, while 25 features were selected from groups A and C. Conclusions. The selected features in this study were mainly obtained from the root, top, and side areas of the tongue. This is consistent with the tongue partitions employed in traditional Chinese medicine. These results provide scientific evidence to TCM tongue diagnosis for health identification.