TCMFVis: A visual analytics system toward bridging together traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine

Abstract

Although traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and modern medicine (MM) have considerably different treatment philosophies, they both make important contributions to human health care. TCM physicians usually treat diseases using TCM formula (TCMF), which is a combination of specific herbs, based on the holistic philosophy of TCM, whereas MM physicians treat diseases using chemical drugs that interact with specific biological molecules. The difference between the holistic view of TCM and the atomistic view of MM hinders their combination. Tools that are able to bridge together TCM and MM are essential for promoting the combination of these disciplines. In this paper, we present TCMFVis, a visual analytics system that would help domain experts explore the potential use of TCMFs in MM at the molecular level. TCMFVis deals with two significant challenges, namely, (i) intuitively obtaining valuable insights from heterogeneous data involved in TCMFs and (ii) efficiently identifying the common features among a cluster of TCMFs. In this study, a four-level (herb-ingredient-target-disease) visual analytics framework was designed to facilitate the analysis of heterogeneous data in a proper workflow. Several set visualization techniques were first introduced into the system to facilitate the identification of common features among TCMFs. Case studies on two groups of TCMFs clustered by function were conducted by domain experts to evaluate TCMFVis. The results of these case studies demonstrate the usability and scalability of the system.