Analysis and Recognition of Traditional Chinese Medicine Pulse Based on the Hilbert-Huang Transform and Random Forest in Patients with Coronary Heart Disease.

Rui Guo,Jianjun Yan,Guoping Liu,Fengyin Yuan,Yiqin Wang,Zhaoxia Xu,Hanxia Yan,Wenjie Xu

doi:10.1155/2015/895749

Abstract

Objective. This research provides objective and quantitative parameters of the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) pulse conditions for distinguishing between patients with the coronary heart disease (CHD) and normal people by using the proposed classification approach based on Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) and random forest. Methods. The energy and the sample entropy features were extracted by applying the HHT to TCM pulse by treating these pulse signals as time series. By using the random forest classifier, the extracted two types of features and their combination were, respectively, used as input data to establish classification model. Results. Statistical results showed that there were significant differences in the pulse energy and sample entropy between the CHD group and the normal group. Moreover, the energy features, sample entropy features, and their combination were inputted as pulse feature vectors; the corresponding average recognition rates were 84%, 76.35%, and 90.21%, respectively. Conclusion. The proposed approach could be appropriately used to analyze pulses of patients with CHD, which can lay a foundation for research on objective and quantitative criteria on disease diagnosis or Zheng differentiation.

Highlights

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an ancient medical practice system which emphasizes regulating the integrity of the human body and its interrelationship with natural environments [1]
Objective and quantitative pulse diagnosis is highly desirable, which is of help to establish the objective and quantitative criteria on disease diagnosis or Zheng differentiation
The proposed technique is based on the intrinsic mode function (IMF) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD)

Summary

Introduction

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an ancient medical practice system which emphasizes regulating the integrity of the human body and its interrelationship with natural environments [1]. Zheng (meaning syndrome or pattern) is a unique TCM concept. It is the overall physiological and/or pathological pattern of the human body in response to a given internal and external condition, which usually is an abstraction of internal disharmony defined by a comprehensive analysis of the clinical symptoms and signs gathered by a practitioner using inspection, auscultation, olfaction, interrogation, and palpation of the pulses [2]. The Zheng differentiation of TCM considers the etiology, location, nature, and condition of a disease during a specific stage of the disease process based on clinical symptoms and signs. Traditional pulse taking has important clinical value on the diagnosis and prognosis of the diseases, especially angiocardiopathy. Objective and quantitative pulse diagnosis is highly desirable, which is of help to establish the objective and quantitative criteria on disease diagnosis or Zheng differentiation

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion