A new method of modeling of inquiry diagnosis for coronary heart disease in traditional Chinese medicine

Coronary heart disease (CHD), as one of the most common cardiovascular diseases in the world, is invading younger patients and brings increasing mortality. In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the diagnosis and treatment of CHD have accumulated a wealth of experience enjoying a long history. Nevertheless, the diagnosis and treatment of CHD usually depend on individual experience of doctors and lack of the standard and objective inquiry information in TCM. In this paper, a new method based on association analysis and feature selection is proposed to establish a clinical data based practical diagnostic model for Chinese medicine syndrome identification in patients with CHD, by way of seeking a combination of symptoms, signs and laboratory criteria associated with the typical syndromes of the disease. A syndrome-topologic and laboratory investigation on a total of 100 features is conducted in 1058 CHD patients. The most typical syndromes revealed in the 1058 CHD patients are the blood stasis syndrome (707 patients, accounting for 66.82%) and the deficiency of heart qi syndrome (727 patients, 68.71%). The models of diagnosis and treatment for these two syndromes are established, respectively. Then, the two diagnostic models for identifying the two syndromes are proved to have the accurate diagnostic rates of 76.3% and 71.4%, respectively. A new method of modeling of diagnosing the two typical syndromes in CHD patients, the blood stasis syndrome and the deficiency of heart qi syndrome, is proposed, which is helpful for shifting the diagnosis of syndrome from traditional experience-based pattern to the data-model-based one, to make the syndrome diagnosis more standard and objective.