Lo Lun-Chien, Chiang John Y, Cheng Tsung-Lin, Shieh Pei-Shuan
Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Changhua Christian Hospital, Changhua 50006, Taiwan ; Graduate Institute of Statistics and Information Science, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua 50058, Taiwan.
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2012;2012:516473. doi: 10.1155/2012/516473. Epub 2012 Sep 17.
The study of TCM agreement in terms of a powerful statistical tool becomes critical in providing objective evaluations. Several previous studies have conducted on the issue of consistency of TCM, and the results have indicated that agreements are low. Traditional agreement measures only provide a single value which is not sufficient to justify if the agreement among several raters is strong or not. In light of this observation, a novel visual agreement analysis for TCM via multiple dimensional scaling (MDS) is proposed in this study. If there are clusters present in the raters in a latent manner, MDS can prove itself as an effective distinguisher. In this study, a group of doctors, consisting of 11 experienced TCM practitioners having clinical experience ranging from 3 to 15 years with a mean of 5.5 years from the Chinese Medicine Department at Changhua Christian Hospital (CCH) in Taiwan were asked to diagnose a total of fifteen tongue images, the Eight Principles derived from the TCM theorem. The results of statistical analysis show that, if there are clusters present in the raters in a latent manner, MDS can prove itself as an effective distinguisher.
运用强大的统计工具对中医一致性进行研究，对于提供客观评估至关重要。此前已有多项研究针对中医的一致性问题展开，结果表明一致性较低。传统的一致性测量仅提供单一数值，不足以判定多个评分者之间的一致性是否显著。鉴于此，本研究提出一种通过多维尺度分析（MDS）对中医进行新颖的视觉一致性分析方法。若评分者中存在潜在的聚类情况，MDS可证明自身是一种有效的区分工具。在本研究中，邀请了一组医生，他们是来自中国台湾彰化基督教医院（CCH）中医科的11位经验丰富的中医从业者，临床经验在3至15年之间，平均为5.5年，让他们对源自中医理论的十五张舌象图片进行八纲辨证诊断。统计分析结果表明，若评分者中存在潜在的聚类情况，MDS可证明自身是一种有效的区分工具。
