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(2020) 20:264

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Open Access

Effective attention-based network for syndrome differentiation of AIDS Huaxin Pang1 , Shikui Wei1 , Yufeng Zhao2*

, Liyun He2 , Jian Wang3 , Baoyan Liu3 and Yao Zhao1

Abstract Background: Syndrome differentiation aims at dividing patients into several types according to their clinical symptoms and signs, which is essential for traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Several previous works were devoted to employing the classical algorithms to classify the syndrome and achieved delightful results. However, the presence of ambiguous symptoms substantially disturbed the performance of syndrome differentiation, This disturbance is always due to the diversity and complexity of the patients’ symptoms. Methods: To alleviate this issue, we proposed an algorithm based on the multilayer perceptron model with an attention mechanism (ATT-MLP). In particular, we first introduced an attention mechanism to assign different weights for different symptoms among the symptomatic features. In this manner, the symptoms of major significance were highlighted and ambiguous symptoms were restrained. Subsequently, those weighted features were further fed into an MLP to predict the syndrome type of AIDS. Results: Experimental results for a real-world AIDS dataset show that our framework achieves significant and consistent improvements compared to other methods. Besides, our model can also capture the key symptoms corresponding to each type of syndrome. Conclusion: In conclusion, our proposed method can learn these intrinsic correlations between symptoms and types of syndromes. Our model is able to learn the core cluster of symptoms for each type of syndrome from limited data, while assisting medical doctors to diagnose patients efficiently. Keywords: Traditional chinese medicine, Machine learning, Syndrome differentiation, AIDS

Background Syndrome diffetentiation in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) syndromes is a method of classifying the whole functional status summarized by clinical symptoms of different individuals during a period of illness. In TCM, this is one of the crucial aspects to study syndromes and plays a guiding role in clinically individualized diagnosis and dialectical treatment of TCM. In recent years, researchers have intensively studied the efficacy of TCM in the treatment of AIDS [1–3]. Many clinical practices and data *Correspondence: [email protected] Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine/National Data Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, No.16 South Street,Dongzhimen,Dongcheng District, 100700 Beijing, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article 2

proved that TCM had made surprising progress in reducing the HIV viral load in the blood and relieving patients’ clinical symptoms and improving quality of life [4–11]. These advances are mainly attributed to the fact that TCM practitioners classified AIDS patients with syndromes and cured them with Chinese medicine treatments. It can be