Pukyong National University

A study by an undergraduate student at PKNU displays spots on the body suitable for acupuncture with AI

- received the best paper presentation award from the Korea multimedia association

Pukyong National University (President Jang Young-Soo) announced on the 21st that Hwang Si-Won, a senior from the department of IT convergence and application engineering, won the best paper presentation award in the undergraduate poster paper oral competition hosted by the Korea multimedia association.

At the recent autumn conference of 2022 hosted by the Korea multimedia association, Hwang Si-Won presented her thesis, ‘Development of a method for displaying the spots on the body suitable for acupuncture in Korean medicine using a generative model’ (advisory prof. Lee Myung-Gi) and received an excellent evaluation.

Hwang Si-won's paper drew attention by showing how to use artificial intelligence to display the acupuncture point through a generative adversarial network (GAN) model, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology, while various studies are being conducted to improve the objectivity of oriental medicine treatment and systematize treatment techniques.

In this thesis, she used ‘Pix2Pix’ and ‘CycleGAN’ models among GAN models based on image conversion algorithms to mark the locations of five acupuncture points on the arm, namely gokji, susamri, whaegwan, joongjeo, and hapgok-hyeol.

By using this method, if an image of a part of the body including arm is input, the position of the standard acupuncture point is customized for each patient and displayed as a white dot. It was found that the final generated image differed by model.

Hwang Si-Won said, “If acupuncture points can be displayed using an artificial intelligence model, I expect that it will provide an objective indicator of acupuncture points to increase accessibility to oriental medicine and be highly utilized in the medical field and education of Korean medicine.”

Hwang Si-Won achieved the results of this research through the research project of ‘development of an acupuncture treatment convergence system that incorporates ICT based on source technology to diagnose acupoint stimulation’, which is being carried out by the division of smart healthcare in Pukyong National University. <Pukyong Today>