Analysis of dialectical thinking about different treatments for the same disease based on decision tree model

Abstract

[Objective]: To analyze dialectical thinking that three different prescriptions treating insomnia which Professor Zhimin Yang used. And to provide a reference for the research of Chinese medicine experts in dialectical thinking. [Methods]: First, we collected three empirical prescriptions that Professor Zhi-Min Yang used from her medical cases about insomnia. We also investigated the patients' demographic feature, historical feature, four diagnostic techniques of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) feature, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index(PSQI), anxiety scale(SAS), depression scale(SDS). Second, we observed the whole treatment process, and defined the standard of curative effects by PSQI reduced rate between before-treatment and post-treatment. Third, to ensure that results have clinical utility, we selected the valid cases to analyze Filter preliminary features from three empirical prescriptions by chi-square test. And then, to analyze the relations among the preliminary indications by decision tree. Finally, to sum up three different prescriptions' dialectical thinking. [Results]: We had collected 78 valid cases of three prescriptions. We investigated 206 features of each case, and filtered 71 preliminary features from three empirical prescriptions by chi-square test. Decision-tree picked up 6 factors, 7 regulations. The accuracy rate of identification was 91.03%.[Conclusion]: The decision tree model can accurately and expeditiously to extract the characteristics from empirical prescriptions, and provide a reference for the research of Chinese medicine experts in dialectical thinking.