Development of a Natural Language Processing Tool to Extract Acupuncture Point Location Terms

Acupuncture point location information is significant to the effect of acupuncture therapy. A wealth of knowledge related to acupuncture point locations is typically dispersed across books or reports in free-text format, which can pose challenges for machines to understand and facilitate. In this study, our purpose is to develop a natural language processing (NLP) tool to extract acupuncture point location information. We adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) Standard Acupuncture Point Locations in the Western Pacific Region (WHO Standard) as our reference standard and corpus. Our proposed approach to develop and validate the NLP tool involves three key steps: 1) We leveraged pre-existing terminologies from the anatomy domain, specifically the International Anatomical Terminology (IAT) and Uber-anatomy Ontology (UBERON), to construct a baseline dictionary of acupoint locations. This dictionary was then used in conjunction with a dictionary lookup method to match terms in the acupuncture location descriptions outlined by the WHO Standard; 2) We employed NLP models based on machine learning and deep learning techniques, specifically utilizing Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for training. The CRFs and RNN models achieved overall F1 scores of 0.955 and 0.945, respectively; 3) We encoded the extracted entities into standardized concepts and enriched the baseline dictionary using these entities. In this study, a customized NLP tool was developed and validated for extracting acupuncture point location terms. This tool can be used in various informatics applications to support acupuncture research, education, and practices.