The lack of visual capability in large language models and the insufficient accuracy of existing multimodal models in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) tongue-image analysis are identified as current challenges. To address these issues, a TCM tongue-image assisted consultation system was constructed, enabling automatic classification of tongue images and the generation of auxiliary diagnostic schemes. Based on UNet, tongue-image segmentation was performed, and a multi-label classification system was built using the TransNeXt backbone to achieve both tongue-body segmentation and multi-label classification. Furthermore, the classification system was integrated with a large language model through a fine-tuned function-calling framework, thereby realizing the TCM tongue-image assisted consultation system. In the validation experiments, the UNet model demonstrated favorable performance in tongue-image segmentation, with mean precision, recall, and intersection over union reaching 97.58%, 98.61%, and 96.25%, respectively. The multi-label classification model developed with the TransNeXt backbone exhibited superior performance in subset accuracy, precision, recall, and F1, achieving 75.69%, 91.18%, 91.41%, and 91.28%, respectively. In the generation of TCM auxiliary diagnostic schemes, the best-performing large language model outperforms the multimodal model in Bleu-4, Rouge-1, Rouge-2, and Rouge-L metrics, achieving 79.03%, 82.46%, 76.00%, and 86.46%, respectively. The traditional Chinese medicine tongue image auxiliary diagnosis system constructed by combining the tongue image multi label classification system and the large language model can assist traditional Chinese medicine in tongue diagnosis, providing technical support for the generation of traditional Chinese medicine auxiliary diagnosis schemes.
SHI Hao-ran, WANG Yue-ming, SHI Lei, WANG Jin, GU Yu, LI Qi.
Auxiliary Tongue Diagnosis System for Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on Large Language Model Function-calling Architecture[J].
Science Technology and Engineering, 2026, 26(13): 5583-5593 DOI:10.12404/j.issn.1671-1815.2503704
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