Objective To observe the characteristics of sublingual collaterals of patients with hypertension and the correlation between TCM syndromes and characteristics of sublingual collaterals based on image data.Methods Totally 303 patients with hypertension were selected from three hospitals in Anhui Province from October 2022 to April 2024,and were divided into liver fire hyperactivity syndrome,yin deficiency and yang hyperactivity syndrome,phlegm and blood stasis syndrome,and yin yang deficiency syndrome according to the syndromes.The patients'sublingual collateral images were captured using smartphones,and the AI open platform system for TCM tongue diagnosis was used to obtain the color,length,width,tortuous degree and concurrent manifestations of the sublingual collaterals,as well as the characteristic indexes,such as color HSV,Lab value,etc.of sublingual collaterals,using a combination of computer vision and manual interpretation,so as to analyze the correlation between the TCM syndromes and the characteristics of the sublingual collaterals.Results The color,length,width,tortuous degree and concurrent manifestations of sublingual collaterals in different syndrome types were statistically significant.The values of V,Lab-L,Lab-a and Lab-b in the phlegm and blood stasis syndrome were significantly lower than those in other syndrome types.The S value of yin-yang deficiency syndrome was significantly lower than that of other syndromes(P＜0.05).Correlation analysis showed that the color of sublingual collaterals was negatively correlated with the values of S,V,Lab-L,Lab-a and Lab-b of patients with different syndrome types(P＜0.05).The degree of stasis of sublingual collaterals in the phlegm and blood stasis syndrome was higher than that in other groups.Conclusion There are differences in color,length,width,tortuous degree and concurrent manifestations among the sublingual collaterals of patients with hypertension,and there is close correlation between the color of sublingual collaterals and its parameters.The objective index of sublingual collaterals is sensitive to hypertension,which is basically consistent with the theory and clinical conclusion of TCM,and can be used as the basis for syndrome differentiation and treatment.

Objective To observe the characteristics of sublingual collaterals of patients with hypertension and the correlation between TCM syndromes and characteristics of sublingual collaterals based on image data.Methods Totally 303 patients with hypertension were selected from three hospitals in Anhui Province from October 2022 to April 2024,and were divided into liver fire hyperactivity syndrome,yin deficiency and yang hyperactivity syndrome,phlegm and blood stasis syndrome,and yin yang deficiency syndrome according to the syndromes.The patients'sublingual collateral images were captured using smartphones,and the AI open platform system for TCM tongue diagnosis was used to obtain the color,length,width,tortuous degree and concurrent manifestations of the sublingual collaterals,as well as the characteristic indexes,such as color HSV,Lab value,etc.of sublingual collaterals,using a combination of computer vision and manual interpretation,so as to analyze the correlation between the TCM syndromes and the characteristics of the sublingual collaterals.Results The color,length,width,tortuous degree and concurrent manifestations of sublingual collaterals in different syndrome types were statistically significant.The values of V,Lab-L,Lab-a and Lab-b in the phlegm and blood stasis syndrome were significantly lower than those in other syndrome types.The S value of yin-yang deficiency syndrome was significantly lower than that of other syndromes(P＜0.05).Correlation analysis showed that the color of sublingual collaterals was negatively correlated with the values of S,V,Lab-L,Lab-a and Lab-b of patients with different syndrome types(P＜0.05).The degree of stasis of sublingual collaterals in the phlegm and blood stasis syndrome was higher than that in other groups.Conclusion There are differences in color,length,width,tortuous degree and concurrent manifestations among the sublingual collaterals of patients with hypertension,and there is close correlation between the color of sublingual collaterals and its parameters.The objective index of sublingual collaterals is sensitive to hypertension,which is basically consistent with the theory and clinical conclusion of TCM,and can be used as the basis for syndrome differentiation and treatment.

Accurate segmentation of retinal blood vessels is of great significance for diagnosing, preventing and detecting eye diseases. In recent years, the U-Net network and its various variants have reached advanced level in the field of medical image segmentation. Most of these networks choose to use simple max pooling to down-sample the intermediate feature layer of the image, which is easy to lose part of the information, so this study proposes a simple and effective new down-sampling method Pixel Fusion-pooling (PF-pooling), which can well fuse the adjacent pixel information of the image. The down-sampling method proposed in this study is a lightweight general module that can be effectively integrated into various network architectures based on convolutional operations. The experimental results on the DRIVE and STARE datasets show that the F₁-score index of the U-Net model using PF-pooling on the STARE dataset improved by 1.98%. The accuracy rate is increased by 0.2%, and the sensitivity is increased by 3.88%. And the generalization of the proposed module is verified by replacing different algorithm models. The results show that PF-pooling has achieved performance improvement in both Dense-UNet and Res-UNet models, and has good universality.
Algorithms ; Retinal Vessels ; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted