Spatial Patterns of the Indications of Acupoints Using Data Mining in Classic Medical Text: A Possible Visualization of the Meridian System.

Abstract

The indications of acupoints are thought to be highly associated with the lines of the meridian systems. The present study used data mining methods to analyze the characteristics of the indications of each acupoint and to visualize the relationships between the acupoints and disease sites in the classic Korean medical text Chimgoogyeongheombang. Using a term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) scheme, the present study extracted valuable data regarding the indications of each acupoint according to the frequency of the cooccurrences of eight Source points and eighteen disease sites. Furthermore, the spatial patterns of the indications of each acupoint on a body map were visualized according to the tf-idf values. Each acupoint along the different meridians exhibited different constellation patterns at various disease sites. Additionally, the spatial patterns of the indications of each acupoint were highly associated with the route of the corresponding meridian. The present findings demonstrate that the indications of each acupoint were primarily associated with the corresponding meridian system. Furthermore, these findings suggest that the routes of the meridians may have clinical implications in terms of identifying the constellations of the indications of acupoints.