Computer Aided Diagnosis for Traditional Chinese Medicine Based on Information Retrieval Techniques

Traditional expert systems for medical diagnosis have a major pitfall, in that it is difficult to adopt new knowledge, particularly from descriptive, incomplete and unstructured information. Information retrieval sounds a natural answer to these problems. This paper presents an information retrieval based approach to computer aided diagnosis in order to tackle this problem. Preliminary experimental results with traditional Chinese medicine expertise show that it can effectively help to diagnose based on the descriptive symptoms provided.