Formalizing the Coding Rules of Clinical Terminology on Traditional Chinese Medicine Using Formal Concept Analysis

Formalizing of the coding rules of clinical terminology on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is an important aspect of medical information mining and has attracted interests of researchers in such diverse fields as information visualization and formal concept analysis (FCA). The main purpose of this paper is to show the use of FCA to formalize and visualize the dependencies of TCM clinical terminology. First, the TCM term and its description are defined as the object and attribute, then the hierarchical relationships of TCM terms has been formalized by concept lattice, finally anonymous nodes and non-disjoint nodes are employed for auditing the completeness, consistency and correctness of the coding rules of TCM terminology. The proposed method is validated by experiments with the case study, which demonstrates that it should be possible to produce a FCA-based method of formalizing and auditing the semantic completeness of TCM terminology.