Artificial intelligence and its application for cardiovascular diseases in Chinese medicine

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are major disease burdens with high mortality worldwide. Early prediction of cardiovascular events can reduce the incidence of acute myocardial infarction and decrease the mortality rates of patients with CVDs. The pathological mechanisms and multiple factors involved in CVDs are complex; thus, traditional data analysis is insufficient and inefficient to manage multidimensional data for the risk prediction of CVDs and heart attacks, medical image interpretations, therapeutic decision-making, and disease prognosis prediction. Meanwhile, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been widely used for treating CVDs. TCM offers unique theoretical and practical applications in the diagnosis and treatment of CVDs. Big data have been generated to investigate the scientific basis of TCM diagnostic methods. TCM formulae contain multiple herbal items. Elucidating the complicated interactions between the active compounds and network modulations requires advanced data-analysis capability. Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) technology has allowed these challenges to be resolved, which significantly facilitates the development of integrative diagnostic and therapeutic strategies for CVDs and the understanding of the therapeutic principles of TCM formulae. Herein, we briefly introduce the basic concept and current progress of AI and machine learning (ML) technology, and summarize the applications of advanced AI and ML for the diagnosis and treatment of CVDs. Furthermore, we review the progress of AI and ML technology for investigating the scientific basis of TCM diagnosis and treatment for CVDs. We expect the application of AI and ML technology to promote synergy between western medicine and TCM, which can then boost the development of integrative medicine for the diagnosis and treatment of CVDs.