Key symptoms selection for two major syndromes diagnosis of Chinese medicine in chronic hepatitis B

Objective: To identify key symptoms of two major syndromes in chronic hepatitis B (CHB), which can be the clinical evidence for Chinese medicine (CM) doctors to make decisions.

Methods: Standardization scales on diagnosis for CHB in CM were designed including physical symptoms, tongue and pulse appearance. The total of 695 CHB cases with dampness-heat (DH) syndrome or Pi (Spleen) deficiency (SD) syndrome were collected for feature selection and modeling, another 275 CHB patients were collected in different locations for validation. Key symptoms were selected based on modified information gain (IG), and 5 classifiers were applied to assist with models training and validation. Classification accuracy and area under receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) were evaluated.

Results: (1) Thirteen DH syndrome key symptoms and 13 SD syndrome key symptoms were selected from original 125 symptoms; (2) The key symptoms could achieve similar or better diagnostic accuracy than the original total symptoms; (3) In the validation phase, the key symptoms could identify syndromes effectively, especially in DH syndrome, which average prediction accuracy on 5 classifiers could achieve 0.864 with the average AUC 0.772.

Conclusion: The selected key symptoms could be simple DH and SD syndromes diagnostic elements applied in clinical directly. (Registration N0.: ChiCTR-DCC-10000759).