Gastrodia elatais graded as top medication in theShen Nong’s Herbal Classic. It was mainly distributed in southwest China. Its quality varied with geographical location. And the quality difference between wild and cultivated sample was extreme. Identifications using traditional methods were unable to accurately distinguish the quality ofG. elata. Therefore, near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy combined with pattern recognition method was used to distinguish the quality ofG. elata from different geographical locations as well as cultivated or wild. The results demonstrated that using NIR spectroscopy combined with multiclass classification algorithm, the geographical location ofG. elata can be accurately distinguished. The prediction accuracy can reach as high as 94.3% and 96.4% for both applications. Besides, the classification model was built without preprocessing; hence, it can be extended to be applied on-site.

The eighteen incompatible medicaments is the incompatibilities in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, in some special occasion, the incompatible medicaments can also be used in one prescription in the clinical applications. In order to reveal the theoretical basis for applications of incompatible medicaments in prescriptions, we analyzed ancient prescriptions and found that there are contrary Chinese herbal nature combina-tions (CHNCs) which have the same meridian tropism as well as the opposite nature and taste in prescriptions. In clinical applications, one of the non-contrary CHNCs was selected as the main response to syndrome differentia-tion. The contrary CHNCs in the same meridian tropism were used to restrict each other and therefore have the protective effects. The features found in this paper will be beneficial to further research on the rational applica-tion of incompatible medicaments.

Chinese herbal nature combination (CHNC) is the particular combination of nature, taste and channel tropism, which can be used to express the effect of Chinese herbal medicine in the clinical application concisely. The complex system model for the relationship between CHNC and viscera was constructed in this paper based on the thinking model of viscera theory. The model is able to reveal the functional features of CHNC. The model will promote research on the relationship between CHNC and viscera and provide new ideas for clinical applications of CHNC.

This study was aimed to explain the relationship between chemical component and therapy objective and to identify effective component group (ECG). The objective of this study is to build a new method to identify the ECG. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formula and one of its treated diseases were selected as the re-search object. The entity grammar systems (EGS) were used as the theoretical framework. A grammatical method for ECG identification was constructed. The component-disease relationship was inferred and the ECG was identi-fied with these inference results. In this paper, 16 compounds which act to 12 proteins in Type 1 diabetes melli-tus (T1D) disease network were identified from Bai-Hu Tang plus Xiao-Ke Fang and 9 chemical compounds were determined as the candidate effective components group. The results indicated that this method can be used to identify ECG and provide a new way to elucidate the molecular mechanism of TCM formula.

For solving the problem that common similarity algorithms are insensitive to the relative differences of different chromatographic fingerprints data, this paper improved the algorithms of improved extent similarity), which named new improved extent similarity. It was confirmed that new improved extent similarity could distinguish) the samples with the same total difference and different distribution of relative differences. by applying) the similarity algorithm to simulated data and the chromatographic fingerprints of nine batches Rukuaixiao tablets. New improved extent similarity could reflect the relative differences of peak areas more sensitively when the relative differences of common peak areas was less than 100%. The result indicates that new improved extent similarity can reflect the large deviation from the established proportion of components, which can be applied to the control of the fluctuation of the established proportion of effective components and the process quality control of Traditional Chinese Medicine .

This study was aimed to construct the pharmacophore models of endothelins A receptor antagonist in the application of screening traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) database for novel ETA Receptor antagonists. Qualitative and quantitative hypotheses were generated by HipHop and HypoGen separately on the basis of 36 compounds with antagonistic action on Endothelins A Receptor expressed in the aortic smooth muscle cells of rats. Database searching method was used to evaluate the generated hypotheses. The optimum hypotheses were used to search TCM database. The results showed that optimum qualitative hypothesis is with six features, which were one aromatic ring, one hydrogen-bond acceptors, one negative ionizable group and three hydrophobic groups, and the CAI value of 103.94. The optimum quantitative hypothesis is with six features, which were one aromatic ring, one hydrogen-bond acceptor, one negative ionizable group, two hydrophobic groups and one exclusive volume, and the CAI value of 45.96. Sixteen compounds from TCM were found in the database searching with the quantitative hy-pothesis. It was concluded that the pharmacophores are reliable and can be used to screen database for novel E-TA inhibitors. The qualitative and quantitative hypothesis can be used to screen database for active compounds and to predict the activity respectively.

The literature study and survey revealed existed problems and factors such as the difficulties to maintain quality of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), sustainable development, homogenization and indeterminacy of clinical orientation diagnosis, lack of favorable evidence-based medicine and pharmacoeconomics data to support, lack of ev-idence of safety evaluation, which restrict the development of TCM enterprises. Based on problems and factors men-tioned above, recommendations were made on the healthy development of TCM enterprises, which include guarantee of the quality of TCM herbs and the sustainable development of its resource; conduct systematic evidence-based pharmacoeconomic research, identify the clinical orientation; carry out safety assessment systematically, improve the specification; improve clinical effectiveness-oriented quality standards.

This study was aimed to establish Chinese medicine efficacy concept network in order to reveal the in-ner relation between traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and efficacy as well as to suggest the application way of efficacy concept network. Through the collation of medicine efficacy recorded in the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China (2010 Edition, Volume I), the correlation relationship between TCM efficacy concept was systematically analyzed, and the efficacy concept network was constructed in order to extract specific effica-cy sub-network based on efficacy concept network and then to discover the efficacy groups by utilizing the net-work clustering algorithm. In the Chinese medicine efficacy concept network, 422 efficacy concepts were con-structed and 21 tightly efficacy groups were discovered. Using the efficacy of promoting blood circulation as an example, the application of sub-networks was discussed. Chinese medicine efficacy concept network can be used to reflect the basic theory and clinical experiences in Chinese medicine , to systematically reveal the relationship between TCM efficacy concepts, which can be beneficial to guide the reasonable application of Chinese medicine in disease treatment .

Functional analysis concisely summarizes and concentrates on the therapeutic characteristics and features of Chinese herbal medicine. Standardization of the terms for Chinese herbal functions not only plays a key role in modern research and development of Chinese herbal medicine, but also has far-reaching clinical applications. In this paper, a new method for standardizing the terms for Chinese herbal function was proposed. Firstly, functional targets were collected. Secondly, the pathological conditions and the mode of action of every functional target were determined by analyzing the references. Thirdly, the relationships between the pathological condition and the mode of action were determined based on Chinese medicine theory and data. This three-step approach allows for standardization of the terms for Chinese herbal functions. Promoting the standardization of Chinese medicine terms will benefit the overall clinical application of Chinese herbal medicine.

Near infrared chemical imaging (NIR-CI) is an emerging technology for rapidly analyzing the critical quality attribute of Chinese materia medica (CMM). It integrates NIR spectroscopy with chemical imaging. In this paper, it provided a systematic introduction to NIR-CI, such as the core part of instrument, the reliability, transformation, analysis and application of high-dimensional data acquisition. In addition, current studies of NIR-CI application in pharmaceutical field were analyzed. Finally, future opportunities and challenges of NIR -CI applications in the quality control of CMM preparation were prospected.