Data mining in real-world traditional Chinese medicine clinical data warehouse

Abstract

Real-world clinical setting is the major arena of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as it has experienced long-term practical clinical activities, and developed established theoretical knowledge and clinical solutions suitable for personalized treatment. Clinical phenotypes have been the most important features captured by TCM for diagnoses and treatment, which are diverse and dynamically changeable in real-world clinical settings. Together with clinical prescription with multiple herbal ingredients for treatment, TCM clinical activities embody immense valuable data with high dimensionalities for knowledge distilling and hypothesis generation. In China, with the curation of large-scale real-world clinical data from regular clinical activities, transforming the data to clinical insightful knowledge has increasingly been a hot topic in TCM field. This chapter introduces the application of data warehouse techniques and data mining approaches for utilizing real-world TCM clinical data, which is mainly from electronic medical records. The main framework of clinical data mining applications in TCM field is also introduced with emphasizing on related work in this field. The key points and issues to improve the research quality are discussed and future directions are proposed.