Data Mining of Acupoint Characteristics from the Classical Medical Text: DongUiBoGam of Korean Medicine.

Taehyung Lee,Won-Mo Jung,Hi-Joon Park,Younbyoung Chae,In-Seon Lee,Ye-Seul Lee,Namil Kim,Hyejung Lee

doi:10.1155/2014/329563

Taehyung Lee, Won-Mo Jung + Show 6 more

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https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/329563

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Abstract

Throughout the history of East Asian medicine, different kinds of acupuncture treatment experiences have been accumulated in classical medical texts. Reexamining knowledge from classical medical texts is expected to provide meaningful information that could be utilized in current medical practices. In this study, we used data mining methods to analyze the association between acupoints and patterns of disorder with the classical medical book DongUiBoGam of Korean medicine. Using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) method, we quantified the significance of acupoints to its targeting patterns and, conversely, the significance of patterns to acupoints. Through these processes, we extracted characteristics of each acupoint based on its treating patterns. We also drew practical information for selecting acupoints on certain patterns according to their association. Data analysis on DongUiBoGam's acupuncture treatment gave us an insight into the main idea of DongUiBoGam. We strongly believe that our approach can provide a novel understanding of unknown characteristics of acupoint and pattern identification from the classical medical text using data mining methods.

Highlights

Throughout the history of East Asian medicine, different kinds of acupuncture treatment experiences have been accumulated in classical medical texts
Among 114 acupoints, 43 acupoints, which appeared more than three times in the text, were selected for the analysis, and 500 patterns were classified into 25 patterns with the three pattern identification categories before tf-idf analysis
A great number of treatment experiences have been accumulated through the long history of East Asian medicine and have been passed down through diverse medical texts

Summary

Introduction

Throughout the history of East Asian medicine, different kinds of acupuncture treatment experiences have been accumulated in classical medical texts. In Korea, the medical book DongUiBoGam is considered as the representative of Korean medicine This classic medical publication was completed in 1610 and published in 1613 under the Joseon Dynasty by a royal physician Heo Jun (1539–1615). It includes latest medical texts published in East Asia until [1] and constitutes unique medical perspective on understanding the human body and treating disorders. In the field of East Asian medicine, various treatment experiences collected over time gradually formulated certain medical theories Such medical theories inversely synthesized a series of treatment processes including diagnosis, pattern identification, and prescription. Since pattern identification closely related to the physician’s academic backgrounds, if one physician has different academic perspective from the others, the way of pattern identification

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