Research on Assistant Diagnostic Method of TCM Based on BERT

Abstract

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) auxiliary diagnosis is a systematic diagnosis platform that uses computer modeling technology to assist TCM doctors in recording diseases, providing on time diagnoses, writing prescriptions, performing tele-medicine, and supporting medical teaching. This study proposes a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers TCM auxiliary diagnosis model using 20,000 items of TCM records. These records were collected from the outpatient clinic of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Specifically, our model aims to predict final diagnosis while taking TCM symptoms as inputs; for example, when we input relief of chest tightness but persistent tiredness and sluggishness, the model provides a diagnosis of chest paralysis. An experiment was conducted on these real-world Chinese medical data. Results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Hence, our proposed model can effectively use the information from the four diagnostic procedures in the TCM text.