Novel Two-Stage Analytic Approach in Extraction of Strong Herb-Herb Interactions in TCM Clinical Treatment of Insomnia

2nd International Conference on Medical Biometrics, ICMB 2010, Hong Kong, China, Jun 28-30, 2010In this paper, we aim to investigate strong herb-herb interactions in TCM for effective treatment of insomnia. Given that extraction of herb interactions is quite similar to gene epistasis study due to non-linear interactions among their study factors, we propose to apply Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR) that has shown useful in discovering hidden interaction patterns in biomedical domains. However, MDR suffers from high computational overhead incurred in its exhaustive enumeration of factors combinations in its processing. To address this drawback, we introduce a two-stage analytical approach which first uses hierarchical core sub-network analysis to pre-select the subset of herbs that have high probability in participating in herb-herb interactions, which is followed by applying MDR to detect strong attribute interactions in the pre-selected subset. Experimental evaluation confirms that this approach is able to detect effective high order herb-herb interaction models in high dimensional TCM insomnia dataset that also has high predictive accuracies.Department of Health Technology and InformaticsRefereed conference pape

Effects of oral temazepam on sleep spindles during non-rapid eye movement sleep: A high-density EEG investigation

Benzodiazepines are commonly used medications that alter sleep spindles during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, however the topographic changes to these functionally significant waveforms have yet to be fully elucidated. This study utilized high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) to investigate topographic changes in sleep spindles and spindle-range activity caused by temazepam during NREM sleep in 18 healthy adults. After an accommodation night, sleep for all participants was recorded on two separate nights after taking either placebo or oral temazepam 15mg. Sleep was monitored using 256-channel hdEEG. Spectral analysis and spindle waveform detection of sleep EEG data were performed for each participant night. Global and topographic data were subsequently compared between temazepam and placebo conditions. Temazepam was associated with significant increases in spectral power from 10.33–13.83Hz. Within this frequency band, temazepam broadly increased sleep spindle duration, and topographically increased spindle amplitude and density in frontal and central-posterior regions, respectively. Higher frequency sleep spindles demonstrated increased spindle amplitude and a paradoxical decrease in spindle density in frontal and centroparietal regions. Further analysis demonstrated temazepam both slowed the average frequency of spindle waveforms and increased the relative proportion of spindles at peak frequencies in frontal and centroparietal regions. These findings suggest that benzodiazepines have diverse effects on sleep spindles that vary by frequency and cortical topography. Further research that explores the relationships between topographic and frequency-dependent changes in pharmacologically-induced sleep spindles and the functional effects of these waveforms is indicated