Causal complexities of TCM prescriptions: Understanding the underlying mechanisms of herbal formulation

Abstract

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a holistic approach to medicine which has been in use in China for thousands of years. The main treatment, Chinese Medicine Formulae is prescribed by combining sets of herbs to address the patient's syndromes and symptoms based on clinical diagnosis. Although herbs are often combined based on various classical formulas, TCM practitioners personalize prescriptions by making adjustments to the formula. However, the underlying principles for the choice of herbs are not well understood. In this chapter, we introduce a framework to explore the complex relationships amongst herbs in TCM clinical prescriptions using Boolean logic. By logically analyzing variations of a large number of TCM herbal prescriptions, we have found that our framework was able to show some herbs may have different pathways to affect effectiveness and such herbs have often been overlooked but can play a weak yet non-trivial role in enhancing the overall effectiveness of the TCM treatment. To achieve this goal, two computational solutions are proposed. An efficient set-theoretic approach is first proposed to study the effectiveness of herbal formulations, and followed by complex network analysis to study the role each herb plays in affecting the outcome.