Classification of Body Constitution Based on TCM Philosophy and Deep Learning

Abstract

There is a growing demand for alternative or complementary medicine in health care disciplines that uses a non-invasive instrument to evaluate the health status of various organs inside the human body. In this regard, we proposed a real-time, non-invasive, and painless technique to assess an individual’s health condition. Our approach is based on the combination of iridology and the philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The iridology chart presents perfect symmetry between the left and right eyes, and such a unique representation reveals the body constitution based on TCM philosophy, which classifies the aforementioned body constitution into a combination of nine categories to describe the varieties of genomic traits. In addition, we applied a deep-learning method along with the combination of iridology and TCM to predict the possible physiological or psychological strength or weakness of the subjects and give advice to them about how to take care of their health according to the body constitution assessment. We used several pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs, or ConvNet), such as a residual neural network (ResNet50), InceptionV3, and dense convolutional network (DenseNet201), to classify the body constitution using iris images. In the experiments, the CASIA-Iris-Thousand database was used to perform this task. The experimental results showed that the proposed iris-based health assessment method achieved an 82.9% accuracy.