For 3,000 years, traditional Chinese doctors have looked at discoloured tongues, lank hair, and skin blemishes, to diagnose conditions from diabetes to brain disease - all based on experience and a gut instinct.

But now Polytechnic University's researchers are creating a digitalised computer data base of Chinese medicine practice to help diagnoses and to bring Chinese medicine to an international market.

"The largest problem that has stunted the development of Chinese medicine is that it's very subjective," said PolyU's computing professor David Zhang Dapeng, who spearheaded the campaign for Chinese medical examination machines, at a showcase of his work yesterday. "Diagnoses vary between different Chinese doctors."

Zhang believes the subjectivity of Chinese medicine keeps many in the international community visiting Western doctors.

"People in the West think that Chinese medicine is mysterious," Zhang said. "We want to explain traditional Chinese medicine to the West. We want to bring what practitioners see to the electronic age."

Zhang's Automated Tongue Image Acquisition and Analysis System captures images of the patient's tongue and compares it with other tongue images in its database. The system assesses the tongue's colour, texture, substance and shape, offering the doctor a result.

It can be used, he says, to help in the diagnosis of diabetes, cardiovascular illness, brain disease, pancreatitis, appendicitis and acute and chronic bronchitis with an average accuracy of 85 per cent.

The machine is one of five that may be used to conduct a comprehensive set of Chinese traditional medical examinations. Others can be used to assess the patient's pulse, face colour, retina and breath to diagnose a host of diseases, some of which have yet to be classified in Western medicine.

Professor Zhang has been working on the machines with traditional Chinese medicine practitioner Li Naimin, director-commissioner of the Diagnostic Professional Committee of the Chinese Association of Integrative Medicine, since 1997.

Li was treating Zhang for a blood circulation problem in their native Harbin when they decided to combine Zhang's talent in biometrics with Li's knowledge of Chinese medicine. The two received HK$18 million from the Hong Kong government's Research Grants Council and the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China.

Both Zhang and Li see bringing Chinese medicine to an international audience as a primary goal of their innovative medical technology with Chinese characteristics.

"We all know that in the West, they take blood tests, which can be painful. But in Chinese medicine, we can tell from the outside what's happening on the inside," Zhang said.

The team has successfully patented some of its technology and published papers on its findings in international medical journals, but Zhang and Li still plan to collect more information for their databases by examining Chinese patients in South China. Zhang reports that he will also work to combine all five machines into one apparatus before he markets his findings to the international medical community.

Siyrce: SCMP, 30 June