Standards Development

Scope

This document specifies clinical knowledge structure to structure traditional Chinese tongue diagnostic information, including tongue body and tongue coating. It is suit for the storage, processing, exchange and sharing of tongue diagnostic information.

Purpose

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is gaining popularity in more and more countries and regions. In the process of TCM's integration with the world, the embedding and docking of information system determines the internationalization of TCM. Currently, the medical system has collected a large number of medical data, which can be utilized to process, analyse to carry out a large number of TCM clinical studies for better serving human health. With the development of science and technology, the arrival of the era of big data and artificial intelligence, the value of this field is becoming more and more prominent. Various intelligent diagnostic devices, electronic medical records and electronic prescriptions have put forward new requirements for information expression, exchange and sharing of TCM diagnostic data. Coding is a formalized language understood by computer that can be used to normalize and describe knowledge, which can remove the communication barriers of information and knowledge between human and computers. Therefore on the basis of the standardized TCM diagnostic terms, it is of great significance to develop the standardized coding rules for structural expression of TCM diagnostic information to achieve efficient storage and exchange of TCM diagnostic information, and then to realize the in-depth sharing and comprehensive utilization of TCM diagnostic information for the development and internationalization of TCM.

Firstly, ISO 23961-1: 2021 Traditional Chinese medicine-Vocabulary for diagnostics-Part 1: Tongue specifies standardized tongue terms, which lay a solid foundation for encoding tongue diagnostic information.

Secondly, the standardized coding rule for tongue diagnostic information is a standard convention for structuring and coding tongue diagnostic data, which helps establish standardized tongue diagnostic database, ensure the integrity of tongue diagnostic data, and then lay a foundation for the data mining and utilization of tongue diagnostic data.

Thirdly, the standardized coding rule is specified to encode tongue diagnostic information, aiming to achieve exchange and sharing of tongue diagnostic data between different systems including electronic medical records, tongue-equipment-related products or services, which is very important to the standardized management of TCM information and the international trade of TCM related enterprises. Therefore, this proposal specified coding rules by structural analysis of tongue diagnostic terms according to their hierarchical relationship based on ISO 23961-1: 2021, which is urgently needed for TCM tongue information sharing, scientific research and standardization management. Not only that, but it also promotes the application of ISO 23961-1: 2021.