A “ disease” in TCM refers to disease entity or disease category, focusing on the macroscopic classification of specific manifestations. “ Syndrome” (also called pattern) refers to a pattern of disharmony or functional disturbance within the functional entities that the TCM model of the body is composed of. Based on the interacting forces in the human body, the forms of many pathological conditions in TCM usually differ from that of identifiable diseases in terminology of the Western medicine. The basic theories of TCM are based on the ancient philosophy of holistic understanding of the universe and the human body, which are commonly associated with the flow of Qi and the balancing of complementary opposites, such as Yin and Yang, or five elements.
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Traditional Chinese Medicine, known as TCM, that is an ancient and unique branch of medical science, which probably covers broad range of practices such as herb medicine, acupuncture, attracts much attention on how to defeat the inconsistency of therapeutic patterns and vagueness of medical terms in TCM in order to improve the user experience of TCM diagnosis. Plenty of the efforts in this field allow researchers and medical practitioners to identify required information more efficiently, discover new substances or relationships, and integrate different sources of information more easily. We tested 12 common clinical cases on the diagnosis system, and it turned out that, given the agree metric, the system achieved better diagnostic accuracy compared to nonontology method-92% of the results fit perfectly with the experts' expectations.Īpplying mathematical models and information technologies to medical intelligence has long been a hot spot in the academic research domains and real-life health care applications. Our diagnostic system provides an online web interface to interact with users, so that users can perform self-diagnosis. The ODS analyzes the clinical cases to obtain a statistical mapping relation between each syndrome and associated symptom set, before rechecking the completeness of related symptoms via ontology refinement. The clinical data used for feature selection is collected from a national TCM research institute in China, which serves as a training source for syndrome differentiation. The ontology transforms the implicit relationships among syndromes into a machine-interpretable model. An Ontology-oriented Diagnosis System (ODS) is created to address the knowledge-based diagnosis based on a well-defined ontology of syndromes. In this paper, we define the diagnosis in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as discovering the fuzzy relations between symptoms and syndromes. The ability to model and use the knowledge becomes an important issue. Although Chinese medicine treatments have become popular recently, the complicated Chinese medical knowledge has made it difficult to be applied in computer-aided diagnostics.