Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition

IntroductionRecognizing a tooth-marked tongue has important clinical diagnostic value in traditional Chinese medicine. Current deep learning methods for tooth mark detection require extensive manual labeling and tongue segmentation, which is labor-intensive. Therefore, we propose a weakly supervised...

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Main Authors: Feilin Deng, Shangxuan Li, Zizhu Yang, Wu Zhou
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2025-06-01
Series:Frontiers in Physiology
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Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2025.1598850/full
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author Feilin Deng
Shangxuan Li
Zizhu Yang
Wu Zhou
author_facet Feilin Deng
Shangxuan Li
Zizhu Yang
Wu Zhou
author_sort Feilin Deng
collection DOAJ
description IntroductionRecognizing a tooth-marked tongue has important clinical diagnostic value in traditional Chinese medicine. Current deep learning methods for tooth mark detection require extensive manual labeling and tongue segmentation, which is labor-intensive. Therefore, we propose a weakly supervised multipleinstance active learning model for tooth-marked tongue recognition, aiming to eliminate preprocessing segmentation and reduce the annotation workload while maintaining diagnostic accuracy.MethodWe propose a one-stage method tongenerate tooth mark instances that eliminates the need for pre-segmentation of the tongue. To make full use of unlabeled data, we introduce a semisupervised learning paradigm to pseudo-label unlabeled tongue images with high model confidence in active learning and incorporate them into the training set to improve the training efficiency of the active learning model. In addition, we propose an instance-level hybrid query method considering the diversity of tooth marks.ResultExperimental results on clinical tongue images verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves an accuracy of 93.88% for tooth-marked tongue recognition, outperforming the recently introduced weakly supervised approaches.ConclusionThe proposed method is effective with only a small amount of image-level annotation, and its performance is comparable to that of image-level annotation, instance-level annotation and pixel-level annotation, which require a large number of tooth markers. Our method significantly reduces the annotation cost of the binary classification task of traditional Chinese medicine tooth mark recognition.
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spelling doaj-art-d329252656fe4dafa05635e49ed0889c2025-08-20T02:09:23ZengFrontiers Media S.A.Frontiers in Physiology1664-042X2025-06-011610.3389/fphys.2025.15988501598850Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognitionFeilin DengShangxuan LiZizhu YangWu ZhouIntroductionRecognizing a tooth-marked tongue has important clinical diagnostic value in traditional Chinese medicine. Current deep learning methods for tooth mark detection require extensive manual labeling and tongue segmentation, which is labor-intensive. Therefore, we propose a weakly supervised multipleinstance active learning model for tooth-marked tongue recognition, aiming to eliminate preprocessing segmentation and reduce the annotation workload while maintaining diagnostic accuracy.MethodWe propose a one-stage method tongenerate tooth mark instances that eliminates the need for pre-segmentation of the tongue. To make full use of unlabeled data, we introduce a semisupervised learning paradigm to pseudo-label unlabeled tongue images with high model confidence in active learning and incorporate them into the training set to improve the training efficiency of the active learning model. In addition, we propose an instance-level hybrid query method considering the diversity of tooth marks.ResultExperimental results on clinical tongue images verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves an accuracy of 93.88% for tooth-marked tongue recognition, outperforming the recently introduced weakly supervised approaches.ConclusionThe proposed method is effective with only a small amount of image-level annotation, and its performance is comparable to that of image-level annotation, instance-level annotation and pixel-level annotation, which require a large number of tooth markers. Our method significantly reduces the annotation cost of the binary classification task of traditional Chinese medicine tooth mark recognition.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2025.1598850/fulltooth-marked tongueweakly supervised learningmultiple instance learningactive learningpseudo label
spellingShingle Feilin Deng
Shangxuan Li
Zizhu Yang
Wu Zhou
Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition
Frontiers in Physiology
tooth-marked tongue
weakly supervised learning
multiple instance learning
active learning
pseudo label
title Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition
title_full Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition
title_fullStr Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition
title_full_unstemmed Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition
title_short Weakly supervised multiple-instance active learning for tooth-marked tongue recognition
title_sort weakly supervised multiple instance active learning for tooth marked tongue recognition
topic tooth-marked tongue
weakly supervised learning
multiple instance learning
active learning
pseudo label
url https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2025.1598850/full
work_keys_str_mv AT feilindeng weaklysupervisedmultipleinstanceactivelearningfortoothmarkedtonguerecognition
AT shangxuanli weaklysupervisedmultipleinstanceactivelearningfortoothmarkedtonguerecognition
AT zizhuyang weaklysupervisedmultipleinstanceactivelearningfortoothmarkedtonguerecognition
AT wuzhou weaklysupervisedmultipleinstanceactivelearningfortoothmarkedtonguerecognition