Iris the picture of health: Towards medical diagnosis of diseases based on iris pattern

Complementary medicine emphasizes therapies which are claimed to improve quality of life, prevent disease, and address conditions that conventional medicine has limited success in curing. Iridology is an alternative medicine technique which examines patterns, colors, and other characteristics of the iris to determine information about a patient’s systemic health. The objective of this paper is to validate the use of iridology to find out body’s organs abnormalities. The proposed method consists of (i) finding the center of iris and its radius, (ii) mapping iridology chart into extracted iris image, and (iii) geometrical analyzing characteristics of the iris to find out which abnormities may be exist in the patient. Two sets of experiment were conducted which in the first one, performance of the proposed was evaluated on CASIA Iris Image Database; and in the second set, a subjective test was given from an iridologist. It was observed in the course of experiments that the accuracy of the proposed method is comparable with that of given from the iridologist. The results of a case study is demonstrated in this paper which shows a 82% correct classification for subjects who are suffered from kidney problems and 93% correct classification for normal subjects. However, it is necessary to perform extensive studies with diseases that do not have ocular manifestations according to conventional medicine in order to validate iridology as a valid scientific technique.