Abstract
The pulse diagnosis is an important and universally used method in Oriental Medicine. Since the traditional method of palpating the pulse relies on the subjective sense in the fingers of an Oriental Medical Doctor(OMD), there has been continued need for more objective method for pulse diagnosis. Recently, various pulse analyzers have been developed to meet such objective palpation and interpretation. However, most of these attempts were not successful to replace OMD's own palpation by fingers. To improve the performance of the pulse analyzers, one should develop machine-appropriate interpretations for the pulse images in the literature, in addition to the improvement in the repeatability and reproducibility. One of such widely-used pulse images to be interpreted is the floating and sinking pulse. The floating and sinking pulses are the two representative pulse images informing us how strong pressure one should apply to obtain the maximal pulse strength. A previous study suggested a convenient and unified measure for the floating and sinking pulses by defining the coefficient of the floating-sinking pulse(CFS). We found the original definition of the CFS could be erroneous under some situations. To improve the performance, we introduce new CFS algorithm for determining the floating and sinking pulse with a pulse analyzers(3-D MAC). To test the performance of the newly suggested algorithm, we conducted a clinical study comparing the agreement ratio with the floating and sinking pulse diagnosis by the OMDs. We found that, among the subjects who are diagnosed with having either the floating pulse or sinking pulse, the new CFS algorithm showed 55.3% diagnosis rate and 73.0% concordance rate, which are about 3% and 6% improvement in the diagnosis rate and agreement rate, respectively, compared to the original CFS algorithm.