title: Usefulness of traditionally defined herbal properties for distinguishing prescriptions of traditional Chinese medicine from non-prescription recipes.
abstract: Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely practiced and is considered as an attractive to conventional medicine. Multi-herb recipes have been routinely used in TCM. These have been formulated by using TCM-defined herbal properties (TCM-HPs), the scientific basis of which is unclear. The usefulness of TCM-HPs was evaluated by analyzing the distribution pattern of TCM-HPs of the constituent herbs in 1161 classical TCM prescriptions, which shows patterns of multi-herb correlation. Two artificial intelligence (AI) methods were used to examine whether TCM-HPs are capable of distinguishing TCM prescriptions from non-TCM recipes. Two AI systems were trained and tested by using 1161 TCM prescriptions, 11,202 non-TCM recipes, and two separate evaluation methods. These systems correctly classified 83.1-97.3% of the TCM prescriptions, 90.8-92.3% of the non-TCM recipes. These results suggest that TCM-HPs are capable of separating TCM prescriptions from non-TCM recipes, which are useful for formulating TCM prescriptions and consistent with the expected correlation between TCM-HPs and the physicochemical properties of herbal ingredients responsible for producing the collective pharmacological and other effects of specific TCM prescriptions.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics and Drug Design Group, Department of Pharmacy, National University of Singapore, Blk SOC1, Level 7, 3 Science Drive 2, Singapore 117543, Singapore.
authors.forename: C Y
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Ung
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: C Y
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.forename: J F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Y Z
authors.initials: YZ
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D055598:Chemical Phenomena; D002626:Chemistry, Pharmaceutical; D002627:Chemistry, Physical; D011307:Drug Prescriptions / Q000145:classification*; D004365:Drugs, Chinese Herbal / Q000145:classification*; D008516:Medicine, Chinese Traditional; D004366:Nonprescription Drugs / Q000145:classification*
chemical_list: D004365:Drugs, Chinese Herbal; D004366:Nonprescription Drugs