Chinese Acupuncture Expert System (CAES)—A Useful Tool to Practice and Learn Medical Acupuncture

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a Chinese Acupuncture Expert System (CAES) that will assist the learning and practice of medical acupuncture. This was the development of a Chinese Acupuncture Expert System which incorporated eight functional modules. These modules were 1) Add Patient Record subsystem; 2) Diagnosis subsystem ; 3) Acupuncture Prescription subsystem ; 4) Needle Insertion Position Animation subsystem ; 5) Acupuncture Points Usage Statistic subsystem ; 6) History Query subsystem; 7) Acupuncture Points Query subsystem and 8) Diagnosis Remarks and Diagnosis Record Save subsystem. Two databases were built—Patient Record database and Diagnosis (Acupuncture) Knowledge database. All the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) knowledge and acupuncture treatment prescriptions were extracted from officially used TCM textbooks and received guidiance and expert advice from two acupuncturists working in this project. A Chinese Acupuncture Expert System (CAES) was built, which after the input from users of any Chinese disease symptoms and signs, it can provide a list of related TCM syndrome diagnoses based on the patients’ disease symptoms and signs, and at the same time it can offer advice of the appropriate Chinese acupuncture treatment to the users. CAES also provided text descriptions and acupuncture animations showing the acupoint locations and the direction and depth of the needle insertion technique. Therefore users can easily learn acupuncture and practice it. This new acupuncture expert system will hopefully provide an easy way for users to learn and practice Chinese Acupuncture and establish its usefulness after it was fully evaluated.