Open up and say “ahhh.” Researchers at the University of Missouri have developed a system that merges a 5,000-year-old Chinese medical tradition with a modern medical technique. The coupling could serve as a pre-screening tool to help with preventive medicine.

For centuries, the Chinese have used a technique that checks the appearance of the tongue to gauge the overall health of the body, or zheng.

Doctoral student Ratchadaporn Kanawong and his colleagues modernized this approach by writing software that works with a camera to image the tongue and then analyze it. Like the ancient tradition, the modern system is designed to check the tongue's coating and color in order to find signs of hot or cold zheng.

“Hot and cold zheng doesn’t refer directly to body temperature,” said Dong Xu. “Rather, it refers to a suite of symptoms associated with the state of the body as a whole.”

For example, a red coating on the tongue indicates hot zheng, which could point to an immune problem. A white coating represents cold zheng and could indicate a hormonal problem.

The team tested the imaging software on 263 patients known to have gastritis and 48 healthy volunteers. The group with gastritis had previously been classified in the traditional way as having either of the two zhengs. This gave the researchers a baseline for the software. The software’s accuracy in determining whether patients had a hot versus a cold zheng -- that is a yellow versus a white tongue coating -- was 85.89 percent accurate when the whole tongue was analyzed and 84.68 percent accurate when the software examined only key features of the tongue.

The hope is that with more testing this software can be used in homes using a webcam or a smartphone app to monitor individual zheng for early signs of illness.