Abstract

Introduction: The diagnosis of the arterial pulse is important in traditional Chinese medicine. The signals of this technique are evaluated by doctors with long-term experience.

Methods: In this study, we used a sphygmography to record the variation in the arterial pulse expressed as two types of signals: the pressure wave and spectrum frequency. The measurement was performed at three positions in the left and right hands in the health people and patients of hepatitis with B carriers in Taiwan. Five variables taken from the pressure wave signals and three variables taken from the spectrum analysis were used and then were evaluated by ANOVA and the Tukey's test.

Results: The results found that some variables from the pressure wave signals were affected by subject, time of measurement and positions. However, results were inconsistent. Spectrum frequency variables were only affected significantly at left Guan position. Detecting time and day did not have significant effect on the spectrum variables for subjects in healthy state.

Conclusion: Our results are consistent with the traditional Chinese medicine information. The significant discrepancy of signals at right Guan position was found for patients of hepatitis with B carriers. The results strongly suggested that the spectrum of sphygmogram could be applied for detection of hepatitis.

Keywords: Hepatitis, left guan position, pulse wave, spectrum analysis, Sphygmography, TCM.

Graphical Abstract