Complex network approach for analyzing TCM clinical herb-symptom relationships

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a discipline of clinical medicine, which focuses on individualized diagnosis and treatment based on observation of the clinical manifestations of real-world patients. The complicated interactions between different medical entities play significant role for individualized treatment. In this paper, we aim to find out the meaningful herb-symptom relationship from large number of clinical data with using complex network approach. We construct two different patient networks to verify the positive correlations between herbs and symptoms in TCM clinical treatment.