Machine learning aided non-invasive diagnosis of coronary heart disease based on tongue features fusion.

Background: Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the first cause of death globally. Hypertension is considered to be the most important independent risk factor for CHD. Early and accurate diagnosis of CHD in patients with hypertension can plays a significant role in reducing the risk and harm of hypertension combined with CHD.
Objective: To propose a non-invasive method for early diagnosis of coronary heart disease according to tongue image features with the help of machine learning techniques.
Methods: We collected standard tongue images and extract features by Diagnosis Analysis System (TDAS) and ResNet-50. On the basis of these tongue features, a common machine learning method is used to customize the non-invasive CHD diagnosis algorithm based on tongue image.
Results: Based on feature fusion, our algorithm has good performance. The results showed that the XGBoost model with fused features had the best performance with accuracy of 0.869, the AUC of 0.957, the AUPR of 0.961, the precision of 0.926, the recall of 0.806, and the F1-score of 0.862.
Conclusion: We provide a feasible, convenient, and non-invasive method for the diagnosis and large-scale screening of CHD. Tongue image information is a possible effective marker for the diagnosis of CHD.