Abstract
The pulse diagnosis is an important method in Oriental Medicine. Recently, there have been continuous attempts to replace the finger palpation by Oriental medical doctors (OMDs) by more objective tools based on machines, e.g., pulse analyzers. To improve the performance of the pulse analyzers, both the machine-appropriate interpretations for the pulse images appeared in the literature and the improvement in the repeatability and reproducibility of the measurement sensors are to be developed. As an attempt towards the transformation of the pulse images in terms of machine-appropriate language, in this work, we suggest an upgraded algorithm for the solid/deficient pulses, which are the two representative pulse images informing us how strong the pulse pressure is. It has been argued that one could determine the solid/deficient pulses by the maximum pulse pressure from pulse analyzers. However, by a clinical test, we found that the maximum pulse pressure alone is not sufficient to determine the solid/deficient pulses. In addition to the maximum pulse pressure, the mean pulse pressure averaged over for five different hold-down pressures(3-D MAC) is needed to improve the agreement with the OMD's decision for the solid/deficient pulse. We found that, among the data diagnosed with having either the solid pulse or deficient pulse by OMDs, the novel algorithm showed 86.0% diagnosis rate and 81.6% concordance rate.
