Quantitative Research on Pulse Momentum in Pulse Diagnosis of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine has a long history of disease diagnosis applications by pulse diagnosis. Ancient physicians classified the pulse types on the basis of pulse manifestation attributes and finger-feeling features. The pulse "position", "number", "shape", and "momentum" can be used as four guidelines for pulse classification. However, the finger feeling is difficult to be expressed in a quantitative approach for clinical teaching and illness-state recognition. The modernization of pulse diagnosis in Taiwan began in the 1970s. The pressure sensor was applied to measure wrist pulse waveforms for analysis. Nowadays, the pulse "position", "number", and "shape" have been quantitatively analyzed and classified by using time-domain pulse signals and their corresponding frequency spectrums. However, since it is lack of effective high-frequency pulse acquisition method and quantitative approach, the quantitative research on "pulse momentum" for judgement of pathological status is still being investigated.

In this research project, the "discrete wavelet transformation (DWT)" is used to decompose the time-domain pulse into several sets of signals, which are allocated at different frequency bands. The high-frequency signal over the range of 12-50 Hz is then acquired to calculate the spectral energy ratio (SER) for quantization of the pulse momentum. In addition, the approximate entropy (ApEn) of the high-frequency signal is computed and defined as a new quantitative factor of pulse momentum. It will be further tried to relate the scores of clinical questionnaires. The analysis method proposed in this project has been preliminarily applied to analyze the pulse waveforms of the persons under the suboptimal health status (SHS) to demonstrate the effectiveness. In the future, more measured pulses of the subject under test will be collected and analyzed to examine the robustness of the proposed method. It is also planned to figure out the relationship between the quantitative factors, such as SER and ApEn, and the high- and low-frequency parameters of the heart rate variability (HRV). It can be further linked to the activation of sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves, and potentially build up an objective bridge of clinical diagnosis to connect the traditional Chinese medicine and modern western medicine.