OBJECTIVETo explore the similarity between traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) syndromes and clinical symptoms and biological parameters in patients with post-hepatitis cirrhosis (PHC).

METHODSAfter the variants had been normalized, 4 methods for similarity analysis, i.e. method of cosine distance, correlation coefficient, D and spectral similarity, were used to analyze the similarity of clinical characteristic information (symptoms), biological parameters and TCM syndromes obtained from 279 patients with PHC.

RESULTSThe corresponding similarity matrixes were used to reflect the similarity between TCM syndromes and symptoms and biological parameters respectively, results obtained by the 4 methods were basically identical. As compared with the traditional correlation coefficient analysis, the other three methods showed a higher level of matching, sensitivity, rationality in quantitative accepting-rejecting and reliability, and were more accordant with clinical practice.

CONCLUSIONThe resemblance between TCM syndromes and clinical information on disease obtained from similarity analysis is basically in accordance with the clinical practice, so, the technique could be taken as a method for finding the characteristics of TCM syndrome with simplified clinical parameters.