Exploring the intricacies of the tongue map reveals valuable insights into the overall health of the human body, shedding light on morphological and physiological issues associated with each body part. Any alterations in these factors serve as interpretable cues, ripe for detailed examination. A pivotal aspect of disease diagnosis through tongue analysis lies in its ability to unveil both the ailments and their underlying causes. This enables practitioners to readily discern the root of the illness. Furthermore, this book delves into the realm of disease prognosis, offering insights into predicting the onset of various conditions. While anchored in the author's proprietary methodology, this book also integrates other reputable and well-documented approaches, making it a comprehensive and authoritative reference for practitioners and enthusiasts alike.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 and Long COVID will remain conditions of great concern for medical practitioners for the foreseeable future. Mainstream treatments recommended for less severe cases of COVID-19 infection include isolation and taking over-the-counter or prescription painkillers, while more severe cases may require hospitalization and treatments such as ventilation. The long-term impact of post-viral conditions such as Long COVID is only beginning to emerge, and so far no effective biomedical treatment methods have been identified.Mainstream treatment is effective, but to what extent? Is there another course of treatment available for patients who do not respond well to mainstream treatments? Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an alternative, due to its history of effectiveness in treating various viral infections such as hepatitis, mumps, the common cold, and herpes zoster. Yet although TCM has advantages in effectively regulating immunity, few practitioners have enough advanced knowledge in treating COVID-19 and Long COVID using TCM methods. This book aims to provide TCM practitioners with comprehensive, elaborate, and up-to-date information and training to manage COVID-19 and Long COVID complaints. Each chapter provides detailed discussions on complete clinical patterns of COVID-19, wide coverage on Long COVID treatments, Chinese herbs and its corresponding acupuncture treatment, provision of various clinical modifications and valuable clinical case studies.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Conference on Medical Biometrics, ICMB 2008, held in Hong Kong, China. The 17 revised full papers and 23 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. Medical biometrics is emerging as a very promising and reliable method for automated medical diagnosis. It integrates multidisciplinary technologies in biology, medicine, electronics, computing, and statistics.

Many difficult scientific discovery tasks can only be solved in interactive ways, by combining intelligent computing techniques with intuitive and adaptive user interfaces. It is inevitable to use human intelligence in scientific discovery systems: human eyes can capture complex patterns and relationships, along with detecting the exceptional cases in a data set; the human brain can easily manipulate perceptions to make decisions. Ambient intelligence is about this kind of ubiquitous and autonomous human interaction with information. Scientific discovery is a process of creative perception and communication, dealing with questions like: how do we significantly reduce information while maintaining meaning, or how do we extract patterns from massive data and growing data resources. Originating from the SIGCHI Workshop on Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery, this state-of-the-art survey is organized in three parts: new paradigms in scientific discovery, ambient cognition, and ambient intelligence systems. Many chapters share common features such as interaction, vision, language, and biomedicine.

This is the first book offering a systematic description of tongue image analysis and processing technologies and their typical applications in computerized tongue diagnostic (CTD) systems. It features the most current research findings in all aspects of tongue image acquisition, preprocessing, classification, and diagnostic support methodologies, from theoretical and algorithmic problems to prototype design and development of CTD systems. The book begins with a very in-depth description of CTD on a need-to-know basis which includes an overview of CTD systems and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in order to provide the information on the context and background of tongue image analysis. The core part then introduces algorithms as well as their implementation methods, at a know-how level, including image segmentation methods, chromatic correction, and classification of tongue images. Some clinical applications based on these methods are presented for the show-how purpose in the CTD research field. Case studies highlight different techniques that have been adopted to assist the visual inspection of appendicitis, diabetes, and other common diseases. Experimental results under different challenging clinical circumstances have demonstrated the superior performance of these techniques. In this book, the principles of tongue image analysis are illustrated with plentiful graphs, tables, and practical experiments to provide insights into some of the problems. In this way, readers can easily find a quick and systematic way through the complicated theories and they can later even extend their studies to special topics of interest. This book will be of benefit to researchers, professionals, and graduate students working in the field of computer vision, pattern recognition, clinical practice, and TCM, as well as those involved in interdisciplinary research.

Ambient Intelligence refers to smart electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. This book originates from the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence in Everyday Life held in San Sebastian, Spain, July 2005. Coverage is devoted to the cognitive aspects of ambient intelligence. The 15 carefully reviewed and revised articles presented are organized in topical sections on human-centric computing, ambient interfaces, and architectures for ambient intelligence.