TCM Prescription Generation via Knowledge Source Guidance Network Combined with Herbal Candidate Mechanism

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) prescriptions have made great contributions to the treatment of diseases and health preservation. To alleviate the shortage of TCM resources and improve the professionalism of automatically generated prescriptions, this paper deeply explores the connection between symptoms and herbs through deep learning technology, and realizes the automatic generation of TCM prescriptions. Particularly, this paper considers the significance of referring to similar underlying prescriptions as herbal candidates in the TCM prescribing process. Moreover, this paper incorporates the idea of referring to the potential guidance information of corresponding prescriptions when model extracts symptoms representations. To provide a reference for inexperienced young TCM doctors when they prescribe, this paper proposes a dual-branch guidance strategy combined with candidate attention model (DGSCAM) to automatically generate TCM prescriptions based on symptoms text. The format of the data used this paper is the “symptoms-prescription” data pair. The specific method is as follows. First, DGSCAM realizes the extraction of key information of prescription-guided symptoms through a dual-branch network. Then, herbal candidates in the form of prescriptions that can treat symptoms are proposed in view of the compatibility knowledge of TCM prescriptions. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use prescriptions as herbal candidates in the prescription generation process. We conduct extensive experiments on a mixed public and clinical dataset, achieving 37.39% precision, 25.04% recall, and 29.99% F1 score, with an average doctor score of 7.7 out of 10. The experimental results show that our proposed model is valid and can generate more specialized TCM prescriptions than the baseline models. The DGSCAM developed by us has broad application scenarios and greatly promotes the research on intelligent TCM prescribing.