Characteristics of the relation between diseases and acupuncture points in human body

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of an acupoint-disease network by using complex networks theory. Firstly, we build an acupoint-disease network using the data from traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture books, and draw the diagram of the acupoint-disease network. Secondly, we make a projection from the acupoint-disease network to a disease-based acupoint network and an acupoint-based disease network respectively. And the static characteristics of these two networks, which include clustering coefficient, average path length and small-world character etc, are analyzed. Finally, we compare the analyzed results above with the traditional Chinese medicine theory, which indicates that the results totally conform to traditional Chinese medicine theory.