(Press-News.org) Physicians often ask their patients to "Please stick out your tongue". The tongue can betray signs of illness, which combined with other symptoms such as a cough, fever, presence of jaundice, headache or bowel habits, can help the physician offer a diagnosis. For people in remote areas who do not have ready access to a physician, a new diagnostic system is reported in the International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology that works to combine the soft inputs of described symptoms with a digital analysis of an image of the patient's tongue.
Karthik Ramamurthy of the Department of Information Technology, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, in Chennai, India, and colleagues, have trained a neural network that can take soft inputs such as standard questions about symptoms and a digitized image of the patient's tongue and offer a likely diagnosis so that professional healthcare might then be sought if needed. The digitized images of the patient's tongue reveal discoloration, engorgement, texture and other factors that might be linked to illness.
Smoothness and "beefiness" might reveal vitamin B12, iron, or folate deficiency, and anemia. Black discoloration could be indicative of fungal overgrowth in HIV patients or prolonged antibiotic use. Longitudinal furrows on the tongue are associated with syphilis. Ulcers may indicate the presence of Crohn's disease or colitis and various other conditions. The team's automated diagnostic, however, utilizes the condition of the tongue in combination with other symptoms to identify whether a patient has any of various illnesses: common cold, flu, bronchitis, streptococcal throat infection, sinusitis, allergies, asthma, pulmonary edema, food poisoning and diverticulitis.
The current system allows diagnosis of fourteen distinct conditions but the team adds that they will be able to add eye images and use those as an additional hard input for their neural network and so extend its repertoire significantly.
INFORMATION:
Karthik, R., Menaka, R., Kulkarni, S. and Deshpande, R. (2014) 'Virtual doctor: an artificial medical diagnostic system based on hard and soft inputs', Int. J. Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Vol. 16, No. 4, pp.329-342.
Montréal, December 5, 2014 - A new study published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) sheds new light on a well-known mechanism required for the immune response. Researchers at the IRCM, led by Tarik Möröy, PhD, identified a protein that controls the activity of the p53 tumour suppressor protein known as the "guardian of the genome".
The researchers study the development of T cells and B cells, which are lymphocytes (or immune cells) that play a central role in protecting our ...
The drugs we release into the environment are likely to have a significant impact on plant growth, a new study has revelealed.
By assessing the impacts of a range of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, researchers at the University of Exeter Medical School and Plymouth University have shown that the growth of edible crops can be affected by these chemicals - even at the very low concentrations found in the environment.
Published in the Journal of Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, the research focused its analysis on lettuce and radish plants and tested the ...
CORAL GABLES, Fla (December 4, 2014) -- How does the brain determine what matters? According to a new scientific article, a brain structure called the insula is essential for selecting things out of the environment that are "salient" for an individual, and dysfunction of this system is linked to brain disorders such as autism, psychosis and dementia.
In psychology and neuroscience, the term "salient" is used to describe a thing, person, place or event that stands out, or that is set apart from others. The current article, published online by Nature Reviews Neuroscience ...
Apixaban (trade name Eliquis) has been approved since July 2014 for acute treatment of adults with deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. In addition, the drug can be used for low-dose long-term treatment to prevent recurrent thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. The German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined in a dossier assessment whether in these cases the drug offers patients an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapies.
According to the findings, considerable added benefit of apixaban is proven for the initial treatment ...
Emergencies at educational establishments are on the increase in recent years and campus officials are beginning to recognize that better communications with their students are now needed. Writing in the International Journal of Business Information Systems, US researchers describe how social networking sites might be exploited when an emergency situation arises to help safeguard students as well as keeping those not directly involved in the situation informed of events. The same insights might be applied in the business environment too.
Wencui Han of the Department of ...
The El Niño Southern Oscillation is Earth's main source of year-to-year climate variability, but its response to global warming remains highly uncertain.
Scientists see a large amount of variability in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) when looking back at climate records from thousands of years ago. Without a clear understanding of what caused past changes in ENSO variability, predicting the climate phenomenon's future is a difficult task. A new study shows how this climate system responds to various pressures, such as changes in carbon dioxide and ice ...
Athens, Ga. - A new article detailing the relationship of two U.S. Supreme Court cases and how they work together to uphold freedom of expression has been published in the Georgia Law Review by William E. Lee, professor of journalism in the University of Georgia Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Lee's article focuses on New York Times v. Sullivan and its companion case, Abernathy v. Sullivan, in which the court upheld the First Amendment rights of both the press and ministers active in the civil rights movement. These rulings affect today's citizen ...
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is among the most frequent leukemias affecting adults in Western countries. It usually occurs in older patients, does not cause any symptoms for a long time and is often only discovered by accident. Despite treatment, relapses frequently occur. The immunologists Dr. Kristina Heinig and Dr. Uta Höpken (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, MDC, Berlin-Buch) and the hematologist Dr. Armin Rehm (MDC and Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin) have now discovered why this is so. In a mouse model they developed, the ...
This news release is available in German.
How can light which has been captured in a solar cell be examined in experiments? Jülich scientists have succeeded in looking directly at light propagation within a solar cell by using a trick. The photovoltaics researchers are working on periodic nanostructures that efficiently capture a portion of sunlight which is normally only poorly absorbed.
Until recently, light trapping within periodically nanostructured solar cells could only be analysed using indirect methods, as captured light is not visible from outside ...
Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags--devices that can transmit data over short distances to identify objects, animals or people--have become increasingly popular for tracking everything from automobiles being manufactured on an assembly line to zoo animals in transit to their new homes. Now, thanks to a new NIST report, the next beneficiaries of RFID technology may soon be law enforcement agencies responsible for the management of forensic evidence.
A typical RFID system consists of a microchip programmed with identifying data--the "tag"--and a two-way radio transmitter-receiver, ...
