Quantifying the Features of Blood Stasis Syndrome from Sublingual Images

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, Shape features of sublingual vein are efficient diagnostic rules for Blood Stasis Syndrome Diagnosis. This paper presents a systematic procedure of shape features quantification of sublingual veins. Three shape features of sublingual veins, including stasis-blob type vein, linear type vein and bifurcate type vein, particularly, the breadth of vein, are quantified. Stasis Blob Degree is defined to estimate the stasis degree of vein regions under consideration and help identify the stasis-blob type vein. Skeletonization process through the Euclidean Distance Maps is implemented and the number of intersection points of the skeleton is calculated to identify whether the sublingual veins belong to linear type or bifurcate type veins. These features of sublingual veins have been successfully identified for 79 out of 100 sublingual images. Finally, the framework of diagnosing Blood Stasis Syndrome by applying the quantified shape features is summarized.