Abstract
In the process of treating pro-diseases with acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) doctors may fine-tune acupuncture prescriptions according to different prior experiences. Different prescriptions will affect the efficiency and effect of acupuncture treatment, and even excessive acupoint selection may cause psychological pressure on patients. We still lack an effective means to analyze the meridian system and acupoint specificity to clarify the mapping relationship between acupoints and diseases. Given the inability of modern medical technology to provide effective evidence support for meridians and acupoints, we combined acupuncture theory with network science for an interdisciplinary discussion. In this paper, we constructed a weighted undirected acupoint-disease network (ADN) based on clinical acupuncture prescription literature and proposed a high-specificity key node mining method based on ADN. Combined with the principle of acupoint selection in TCM, the proposed method balanced the contribution of local areas to the network based on the distribution characteristics of meridians and selected 30 key acupoints with high influence on the global topology according to the evaluation index of key nodes. Finally, we compared the proposed method with the other six classical node importance evaluation algorithms in terms of resolution, network loss, and accuracy. The comprehensive results show that the marked key acupoint nodes make outstanding contributions to the connectivity, topological structure, and weighted benefits of the network, and the stability and specificity of the algorithm guarantee the reliability of the key acupoint nodes. We consider that these key acupoints with high centrality in ADN can be used as core acupoints to help researchers explore targeted and high-impact acupoint combinations under resource constraints and optimize existing acupuncture prescriptions.
Highlights
As a traditional medical method, acupuncture has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international organizations for its reliable clinical efficacy for many years [1]
It is worth mentioning that Benias et al in their latest study found a previously unrecognized but widespread and macroscopic space within and between tissues, which expanded and standardized the concept of the human interstitium [11]. e interstitium is a complex network of fluid-filled channels, and its location, form of existence, and potential function have made many scholars associate it with the meridian system in the field of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)
Data Availability. e data source of this paper consists of two parts. e first part is the statistical results of the acupoints frequently cited in the acupuncture prescriptions for common diseases, which is the summary of the acupuncture prescriptions for common diseases recorded in 5733 Chinese Clinical Acupuncture literature [25]. e data source involved a total of 50 common human diseases, including neurological, respiratory, digestive, cardiovascular, dermatological, gynecological, and a variety of rehabilitation diseases. ese common diseases are widely representative of the therapeutic goals of TCM acupuncture
Summary
As a traditional medical method, acupuncture has been recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international organizations for its reliable clinical efficacy for many years [1]. Erefore, in recent years, a large number of researchers have carried out in-depth studies on acupoint specificity from multiple perspectives, including literature, clinic, biological structure, and biophysical properties [2, 3]. They tried to Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine analyze the influence of acupoints (PC6 [4], LI4 [5], KI1 [6]) on the human body by studying the activity characteristics of EEG signals, and the results showed that all these acupoints could activate specific cerebral cortex regions. The correlation between them needs to be further analyzed and proved, by comparing the structural characteristics of interstitium and meridian system, it is undeniable that the network paradigm has always been the basis for the body to transmit information and control the multisystem cooperation
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