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Journal of Healthcare Engineering. 2021 Mar 3;2021:5599272.

Study on Potential of Meridian Acupoints of Traditional Chinese Medicine
Qiuping Li, Tianxia Zhao, Xin'an Wang, Changpei Qiu, Bing Zhou, Hu Wang, Bo Wang

The Key Laboratory of Integrated Microsystems, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate
School, Shenzhen 518055, China.

Abstract
In recent years, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has attracted more and more attention due to its good therapeutic effect, low cost, and convenience. This research is also a part of the goal of the modernization of TCM. Based on the meridian electric potential acquisition system independently developed by our project team, in this paper, we designed the human body's meridian electric potential acquisition scheme. We use principal component analysis (PCA) to prove that the meridional potential signal is derived from the ECG signal. Then, Inception ResNet V2 was used to classify acupoints and nonacupoints. Finally, the classification accuracy rate reached 86.59045265, and the F1 score = 0.72161642. This shows that acupoints and nonacupoints can be distinguished by their surface potential.

Free full text:
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jhe/2021/5599272/

Excerpts:

"Meridian theory is a basic theory that expounds the concept of human body’s meridian, the composition, circulation distribution, physiological function, pathogenesis changes, and the relationship between the meridian system and zang-fu organs, body officials and orifices, qi, and blood and is an important part of the theoretical system of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The meridian system is composed of meridians and collaterals. The meridians include the twelve meridians, the eight odd meridians the twelve tendons, and the twelve skin parts attached to the twelve meridians. The twelve meridians, which are the meridians to which the twelve zang-fu organs belong, are the core part of the meridians system, which is called Jing. There are relatively few quantitative studies of channels and collaterals in science.

"In recent years, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has been gaining more and more attention as the traditional therapy of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the world due to its simplicity, convenience, efficiency, and cheapness [1–3]. There is a growing amount of studies on specificities of meridian acupoints through biophysics [4–6], electrophysiology [7–9], infrared imaging [3, 10], and so forth."

"The world is witnessing an unprecedented growth of cyber-physical systems (CPS), which are foreseen to revolutionize our world via creating new services and applications in a variety of sectors such as environmental monitoring, mobile health systems, and intelligent transportation systems [14]. Combining big data with TCM will bring about important social value and economic benefit.

"Acupoints distributed in the meridian system provide some unique ways of signal transmission and information processing, including electrical information [8]. However, up to now, there are few researches on the modeling of meridian system from the perspective of electronic information transmission. In addition, these studies mainly explored the hysteresis characteristics of meridian system through electronic acupoint stimulation signals [15] rather than directly exploring through acupoint electric potential signals [8, 10]. In some papers, the characteristics of parts of the body's meridians were studied [16–18], but rarely from the holistic theory of Chinese medicine, the systematic study of the twelve meridians was done in a human body. Based on the holistic view of Traditional Chinese Medicine, this study designed and realized the experimental study of human twelve meridians electric potential collection based on the multichannel human meridians electric potential collection system independently developed by the project team."

"6. Conclusion
Our study showed that the electric potential is detected along the meridians all over the body, and it is found that the electric potential signals have the characteristics of ECG signals, or the electric potential signals of the human meridians should be the derived signals of ECG signals. The results of this trial would help to prove that in Chinese medicine the heart controls mental activities theory. Then we tried to classify the acupoint and nonacupoint by the collected electric potential signals, and finally we got the classification accuracy rate of 86.59% and F1 score of 0.7216. It is indicated that acupoints and nonacupoints can be distinguished by their surface potential. In the following work, we will further analyze the potential characteristics of meridian acupoints. We will analyze the differences between the meridians and collaterals; meanwhile we will analyze the population with related diseases to evaluate the severity of the disease from the quantitative analysis of the meridian potential."



Comments:

1. My usual complaint - the authors do not acknowledge that the concept of meridians is rejected by scientific medicine, or even that it is controversial.

2. When I taught high school chemistry, we emphasized the proper use of significant figures: "Significant figures (also known as the significant digits, precision or resolution) of a number in positional notation are digits in the number that are reliable and absolutely necessary to indicate the quantity of something."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_figures

Depending on the field and the type of measurement, I think it would be rare to have a result determined to more than three or four significant figures (an exception is high energy physics, which can determine some physical properties to extremely high levels of precision).

Thus, when I see a statement such as "the classification accuracy rate reached 86.59045265" (ten significant figures), implying that they are confident that their accuracy lies between 86.59045264 and 86.59045266, and is likely closer to 86.59045265 than to either of these values, I conclude that the authors do not have a good understanding of science.