Enhancing traditional Chinese medicine diagnostics: Integrating ontological knowledge for multi-label symptom entity classification.

Journal: Mathematical biosciences and engineering : MBE
Published Date:

Abstract

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted syndrome differentiation and disease diagnoses primarily confront the challenges of accurate symptom identification and classification. This study introduces a multi-label entity extraction model grounded in TCM symptom ontology, specifically designed to address the limitations of existing entity recognition models characterized by limited label spaces and an insufficient integration of domain knowledge. This model synergizes a knowledge graph with the TCM symptom ontology framework to facilitate a standardized symptom classification system and enrich it with domain-specific knowledge. It innovatively merges the conventional bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) + bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) + conditional random fields (CRF) entity recognition methodology with a multi-label classification strategy, thereby adeptly navigating the intricate label interdependencies in the textual data. Introducing a multi-associative feature fusion module is a significant advancement, thereby enabling the extraction of pivotal entity features while discerning the interrelations among diverse categorical labels. The experimental outcomes affirm the model's superior performance in multi-label symptom extraction and substantially elevates the efficiency and accuracy. This advancement robustly underpins research in TCM syndrome differentiation and disease diagnoses.

Authors

  • Hangle Hu
    School of Computer Science, Jiangxi University of Chinese Medicine, Nanchang 330004, China.
  • Chunlei Cheng
    School of Computer Science, Jiangxi University of Chinese Medicine, Nanchang 330004, China.
  • Qing Ye
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430000, China.
  • Lin Peng
    Department of dermatology, Tongji University Affiliated Tongji Hospital, Shanghai, China.
  • Youzhi Shen
    School of Computer Science, Jiangxi University of Chinese Medicine, Nanchang 330004, China.