AIM in Alternative Medicine

ABSTRACT

Alternative medicine (AM) is one of the medical fields that use more natural and traditional therapies for disease diagnosis and treatment, in which traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) now has been recognized as one of the main approaches of AM. As a clinical and evidencedriven discipline with long histories, AM is also heavily relied on in the utilization of big healthcare and therapeutic data for improving the capability of diagnosis and treatment. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted in AM to deliver more practical and feasible intelligent solutions for clinical operations since 1970s. This chapter summarizes the main approaches, related typical applications, and future directions of AI in AM to give related researchers a brief useful reference. We find that although AM has not been widely used in clinical practice internationally, the AI studies showed abundant experiences and technique trials in expert system, machine learning, data mining, knowledge graph, and deep learning. In addition, various types of data, such as bibliographic literatures, electronic medical records, and images were used in the related AI tasks and studies. Furthermore, during this COVID-19 pandemic era, we have witnessed the clinical effectiveness of TCM for COVID-19 treatment, which mostly was detected by real-world data mining applications. This indicates the potential opportunity of the booming of AI research and applications in various aspects (e.g., effective clinical therapy discovery and network pharmacology of AM drugs) in AM fields. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.