Evidence-based decision support for the clinical practice of acupuncture: Data mining approaches

The concept and methodology of evidence-based medicine (EBM) and the strategy to promote efficacy of acupuncture in clinical practice are introduced in this paper. Then it focuses on using the data mining approaches to integrate the primary evidence from real practice based on conventional clinical data and secondary evidence by systematic literature review or Meta-analysis. The new analytic method is capable of explore in-depth on the latent rules and relations of acupuncture and Chinese medicine versus the effectiveness in real practice. A data warehouse is recommended to be set up to store and manage the above evidence processed by appropriate data mining algorithms and models. As the data from different origins is hopefully to be integrated in a clinical decision support system, it will be able to provide evidence-based references and recommendations for the clinical practice of acupuncture and Chinese medicine.