Feasibility Study of Google's Teachable Machine in Diagnosis of Tooth-Marked Tongue

Background: A Teachable Machine is a kind of machine learning web-based tool for general persons. In this paper, the feasibility of Google's Teachable Machine (ver. 2.0) was studied in the diagnosis of the tooth-marked tongue. Methods: For machine learning of tooth-marked tongue diagnosis, a total of 1,250 tongue images were used on Kaggle's web site. Ninety percent of the images were used for the training data set, and the remaining 10% were used for the test data set. Using Google's Teachable Machine (ver. 2.0), machine learning was performed using separated images. To optimize the machine learning parameters, I measured the diagnosis accuracies according to the value of epoch, batch size, and learning rate. After hyper-parameter tuning, the ROC (receiver operating characteristic) analysis method determined the sensitivity (true positive rate, TPR) and specificity (false positive rate, FPR) of the machine learning model to diagnose the tooth-marked tongue. Results: To evaluate the usefulness of the Teachable Machine in clinical application, I used 634 tooth-marked tongue images and 491 no-marked tongue images for machine learning. When the epoch, batch size, and learning rate as hyper-parameters were 75, 0.0001, and 128, respectively, the accuracy of the tooth-marked tongue's diagnosis was best. The accuracies for the tooth-marked tongue and the no-marked tongue were 92.1% and 72.6%, respectively. And, the sensitivity (TPR) and specificity (FPR) were 0.92 and 0.28, respectively. Conclusion: These results are more accurate than Li's experimental results calculated with convolution neural network. Google's Teachable Machines show good performance by hyper-parameters tuning in the diagnosis of the tooth-marked tongue. We confirmed that the tool is useful for several clinical applications.