Study on the Syndrome Characteristics and Classification Model of Non- Small Cell Lung Cancer Based on Tongue and Pulse Data

Abstract

Background: Lung cancer is a common malignant tumor that affects people's health seriously. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is one of the effective methods for the treatment of advanced lung cancer, accurate TCM syndrome differentiation is essential to treatment. When the symptoms are not obvious, the traditional symptom-based syndrome differentiation cannot be carried out. There is a close relationship between syndrom and index of western medicine, the combination of micro index and macro symptom can assist syndrome differentiation effectively.Methods: Tongue and pulse data of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with Qi deficiency syndrome (n=163), patients with Yin deficiency syndrome (n=174) and healthy controls (n=185) were collected by using intelligent Tongue and Face Diagnosis Analysis-1 instrument and Pulse Diagnosis Analysis-1 instrument, respectively. The characteristics of tongue and pulse data were analyzed, the correlation analysis was also made on tongue and pulse data. And four machine learning methods, namely Random Forest, Logistic Regression, Support Vector Machine and Neural Network, were used to establish the classification models based on symptoms, tongue & pulse data, and symptoms & tongue & pulse data, respectively.Results: Significant difference indexes of tongue diagnosis between Qi deficiency syndrome and Yin deficiency syndrome were TB-a, TB-S, TB-Cr, TC-a, TC-S, TC-Cr, perAll and the tongue coating texture indexes including TC-Con, TC-ASM, TC-MEAN, and TC-ENT. Significant difference indexes of pulse diagnosis were t4 and t5. The classification performance of each model based on different data sets was as follows: model of tongue & pulse data <model of symptom < model of symptom & tongue & pulse data. The Neural Network model had a better classification performance for the symptom & tongue & pulse data, with an area under the ROC curve and accuracy rate were 0.9401 and 0.8806.Conclusions:This study explored the characteristics of tongue and pulse data of NSCLC with Qi deficiency syndrome and Yin deficiency syndrome, and established syndromes classification model. It was feasible to use tongue and pulse data as one of the objective diagnostic indexes in Qi deficiency syndrome and Yin deficiency syndrome of NSCLC.Name of the registry: Chinese Clinical Trial RegistryTrial registration number: ChiCTR1900026008; ChiCTR-IOR-15006502 Date of registration: Jun. 04th, 2015URL of trial registry record: http://www.chictr.org.cn/showprojen.aspx?proj=11119;http://www.chictr.org.cn/edit.aspx?pid=38828&htm=4 (This is a retrospective registration)