Detection of herb-symptom associations from traditional chinese medicine clinical data

YesTraditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an individualized medicine by observing the symptoms and signs (symptoms in brief) of patients. We aim to extract the meaningful herb-symptom relationships from large scale TCM clinical data. To investigate the correlations between symptoms and herbs held for patients, we use four clinical data sets collected from TCM outpatient clinical settings and calculate the similarities between patient pairs in terms of the herb constituents of their prescriptions and their manifesting symptoms by cosine measure. To address the large-scale multiple testing problems for the detection of herb-symptom associations and the dependence between herbs involving similar efficacies, we propose a network-based correlation analysis (NetCorrA) method to detect the herb-symptom associations. The results show that there are strong positive correlations between symptom similarity and herb similarity, which indicates that herb-symptom correspondence is a clinical principle adhered to by most TCM physicians. Furthermore, the NetCorrA method obtains meaningful herb-symptom associations and performs better than the chi-square correlation method by filtering the false positive associations. Symptoms play significant roles for the prescriptions of herb treatment. The herb-symptom correspondence principle indicates that clinical phenotypic targets (i.e., symptoms) of herbs exist and would be valuable for further investigations

Nuclear effects in the Drell-Yan process at very high energies

We study Drell-Yan (DY) dilepton production in proton(deuterium)-nucleus and in nucleus-nucleus collisions within the light-cone color dipole formalism. This approach is especially suitable for predicting nuclear effects in the DY cross section for heavy ion collisions, as it provides the impact parameter dependence of nuclear shadowing and transverse momentum broadening, quantities that are not available from the standard parton model. For p(D)+A collisions we calculate nuclear shadowing and investigate nuclear modification of the DY transverse momentum distribution at RHIC and LHC for kinematics corresponding to coherence length much longer than the nuclear size. Calculations are performed separately for transversely and longitudinally polarized DY photons, and predictions are presented for the dilepton angular distribution. Furthermore, we calculate nuclear broadening of the mean transverse momentum squared of DY dileptons as function of the nuclear mass number and energy. We also predict nuclear effects for the cross section of the DY process in heavy ion collisions. We found a substantial nuclear shadowing for valence quarks, stronger than for the sea.Comment: 46 pages, 18 figures, title changed and some discussion added, accepted for publication in PR

A facile enantioselective approach to neolignans

An enantioselective and stereoselective synthesis of 8-O-4' neolignans is reported in which a natural 8-0-4', norneolignan is enantioselectively synthesized as a single erythro isomer. Furthermore the route has been adapted to allow the enantioselective synthesis of 1,4-benzodioxane neolignans. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved