The roll of computational methods in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) with an approach to Traditional Iranian Medicine (TIM)

According to WHO strategy for improving the quality of disease treatment, old but useful remedies should be integrated with modern medical methods. Traditional Chinese medicine has been used to treat diseases for more than4000 years but recently has been focused around the world because of its efficiency in treatment of a wide range of diseases as well as having lower side effects[1].Traditional Chinese medicine was established based on philosophical frameworks such as the Yin-Yang and Zang Fu theories [2]. For this reason, traditional Chinese medicine resources was studied and classifiedby computational methods. Furthermore, differences and similarities with western therapeutic approach werereported. In answer to challenge of increased uses of traditional Chinese medicine, many databases were developed. These databases were consists of formulations of medicine sources, side effects, physical characteristics, molecular properties, 3D structures and their application [3]. In this study, we evaluated and compared some of more important of these databases. These databases not only simplify the understanding of traditional Chinese medicine therapy mechanisms and genes interaction, but also are useful for moderntherapeutic studies. Traditional Iranian medicine with a long and old historyhas been used in prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and elimination of diseases [4]. The principles and methods used for diagnosis and treatment in traditional Iranian and Chinese medicine are very different [5]. On the other hand, there aren’t any specialized databases containing information about traditional Iranian medicine. Therefore, here we can suggest developing of traditional Iranian medicine databases by computational method

Keywords:

Traditional medicine methods , data and text mining , computational methods