Abstract
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played an indispensable role in clinical diagnosis and treatment. Based on a patient's symptom phenotypes, computation-based prescription recommendation methods can recommend personalized TCM prescription using machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. However, owing to the complexity and individuation of a patient's clinical phenotypes, current prescription recommendation methods cannot obtain good performance. Meanwhile, it is very difficult to conduct effective representation for unrecorded symptom terms in an existing knowledge base. In this study, we proposed a subnetwork-based symptom term mapping method (SSTM) and constructed a SSTM-based TCM prescription recommendation method (termed TCMPR). Our SSTM can extract the subnetwork structure between symptoms from a knowledge network to effectively represent the embedding features of clinical symptom terms (especially the unrecorded terms). The experimental results showed that our method performs better than state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the comprehensive experiments of TCMPR with different hyperparameters (i.e., feature embedding, feature dimension, subnetwork filter threshold, and feature fusion) demonstrate that our method has high performance on TCM prescription recommendation and potentially promote clinical diagnosis and treatment of TCM precision medicine.
Highlights
For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played a fundamental role in protecting the health of Chinese people
If we can make good use of the existing TCM clinical prescription data, combine artificial intelligence methods for mining, and carry out intelligent prescription recommendation method for TCM, it will be very favourable for assisting doctors in diagnosis and treatment
We proposed a subnetwork-based symptom term mapping method SSTM and we proposed a TCMPR method for TCM prescription recommendation based on SSTM
Summary
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has played a fundamental role in protecting the health of Chinese people. The treatment process of TCM can be termed as “Li-fa-fang-yao” [1, 2], referring to theory, treatment, prescription, and herb, respectively; that is, the cause and mechanism of the disease are determined according to the patient’s clinical information (such as age, gender, history of present illness, and chief complaint), and the corresponding treatment method is determined according to the disease mechanism, and the prescription and appropriate herbs are selected for the patient [3]. During this process, the quality of prescriptions issued by TCM doctors directly determines the therapeutic effect of TCM. If we can make good use of the existing TCM clinical prescription data, combine artificial intelligence methods for mining, and carry out intelligent prescription recommendation method for TCM, it will be very favourable for assisting doctors in diagnosis and treatment
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