Department of TCM, Changhua Christian Hospital, 135 Nanxiao Street, Changhua City 500, Taiwan.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2012;2012:178081. doi: 10.1155/2012/178081. Epub 2011 Jun 30.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnostics, it is an important issue to study the degree of agreement among several distinct practitioners. In order to study the reliability of TCM diagnostics, we have to design an experiment to simultaneously deal with both of the cases when the data is ordinal and when there are many TCM practitioners. In this study, we consider a reliability measure called "Krippendorff's alpha" to investigate the agreement of tongue diagnostics in TCM. Besides, since it is not easy to obtain a large data set with patients rated simultaneously by many TCM practitioners, we use the renowned "bootstrapping" to obtain a 95% confidence interval for the Krippendorff's alpha. The estimated Krippendorff's alpha for the agreement among ten physicians that discerned fifteen randomly chosen patients is 0.7343, and the 95% bootstrapping confidence interval for the true alpha coefficient is [0.6570, 0.7349]. The data was collected and analyzed at the Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Changhua Christian Hospital (CCH) in Taiwan.
在中医(TCM)诊断中,研究几位不同医师之间的一致性程度是一个重要问题。为了研究 TCM 诊断的可靠性,我们必须设计一个实验来同时处理数据为有序和有许多 TCM 医师的情况。在这项研究中,我们考虑了一种称为“克里彭多夫α”的可靠性度量标准,以研究中医舌诊的一致性。此外,由于很难获得同时由许多 TCM 医师对患者进行评分的大型数据集,因此我们使用著名的“自举”方法来获得克里彭多夫α的 95%置信区间。辨别十五位随机选择的患者的十位医师之间的一致性的估计克里彭多夫α为 0.7343,真实α系数的 95%自举置信区间为[0.6570,0.7349]。数据是在台湾彰化基督教医院(CCH)的传统中医部门收集和分析的。