Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a global financial and medical burden, because its high morbidity and mortality. Tongue diagnosis is an important diagnostic tool in traditional Chinese medicine. However, tongue diagnosis often biased by subjective judgements and environmental factors. The automatic tongue diagnosis system can noninvasively capture tongue images, automatically correct any lighting and color deviation and analyze tongue manifestations.~This protocol is a cross-sectional, case-controlled observational study investigating the tongue features of non-dialysis CKD and end-stage renal disease patients by using the noninvasive ATDS. CKD patients who meets inclusion and exclusion criteria will be enrolled. Participants will be divided into 3 groups according to their renal function and accept dialysis or not, including a non-dialysis CKD group, end stage renal disease (ESRD) group and control group. Tongue images will be captured and 9 tongue features including tongue shape, tongue color, fur thickness, fur color, saliva, tongue fissure, ecchymosis, tooth mark, and red dots will be extracted and analyzed by ATDS.~This protocol aims to apply noninvasive ATDS to analyze tongue features of CKD patients.
The Automatic Tongue Diagnosis System (ATDS) was developed to capture tongue images and extract features reliably to assist the diagnosis of traditional chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners.This project will employ the ATDS verified to extract the tongue features of patients with chronic kidney disease. A TCM indices derived through the non-intrusive tongue diagnosis procedure can provide valuable information for clinical doctors to analyze the current status of a patient and dynamically schedule a treatment plan, facilitating early detection and diagnosis of chronic kidney disease.