Abstract
Pulse signal analysis plays an important role in promoting the objectification of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Like electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, wrist pulse signals are mainly caused by cardiac activities and are valuable in analyzing cardiac diseases. A large number of studies have reported ECG signals can distinguish gender characteristics of normal healthy subjects using entropy complexity measures, consistently showing more complexity in females than males. No research up to date, however, has been found on examining gender differences with wrist pulse signals of healthy subjects on entropy complexity measures. This paper is aimed to fill in the research gap, which could, in turn, provide a deeper insight into the pulse signal and might identify potential differences between ECG signals and pulse signals. In particular, several complementary entropy measures with corresponding refined composite multiscale versions are established to perform the analysis for the filtered TCM pulse signals. Experimental results reveal that regardless of entropy measures used, there is no statistically significant gender difference in terms of entropy complexity, indicating that the pulse signal holds less gender characteristics than the ECG signal. In view of these findings, wrist pulse signals could be likely to provide different pieces of information to ECG signals. The present study is the first to quantitatively evaluate gender differences in healthy pulse signals with measures of entropy complexity and more importantly; we expect this study could make contribution to the ongoing pulse intelligent diagnosis and objective analysis, further facilitating the modernization of TCM pulse diagnosis.
Highlights
There are four major diagnostic methods of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), i.e., looking, listening, asking, and feeling the pulse
The fuzzy entropy (FuEn) is more stable than the sample entropy (SaEn) because of the more smooth growth on the scale without any outliers. e reason is that the soft and continuous boundaries used in FuEn computation enable stronger relative consistency. is confirms the FuEn measure is a better choice in follow-up pulse analysis and diagnosis research
Consistent with those obtained in previous studies, there is no observation of significant gender differences
Summary
There are four major diagnostic methods of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), i.e., looking, listening, asking, and feeling the pulse. Pulse diagnosis has played an indispensable role in TCM as well as in traditional Indian/Korean medicine. It is held in TCM theory that pulse conditions are closely tied to the heart beating, blood patency and adequacy, and deficiency of Qi and blood [2, 7]. The practice of TCM pulse diagnosis is highly subjective, extremely depending on the experience of the practitioners which usually require years of training. In this case, diagnosis results may be not so objective and reliable. Objective analysis and interpretation of the wrist pulse signal, known as computational pulse signal analysis, has been developed in the last few decades [8,9,10,11,12,13]
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