Healing Functions of Carthami Flos against Contusion and Other Potential Damages Carthami Flos (CF), a Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), has been widely used in TCM prescriptions and Chinese patent medicines against contusion and potential bone fractures and striated muscle damages for its outstanding healing functions. Although intensively studied, its healing mechanisms w.r.t. TCM theory are still not elucidated at protein interaction level. In this study, bioinformatics analysis was deployed based on experimentevidenced reliable knowledge on bioactive compounds and targeted proteins. Further enrichment analysis revealed three key role healing functions provided by CF e.g., regulation of blood vessel diameter, ossification, and regulation of striated muscle development. Besides, underlying protein interaction networks were also proposed and validated. This study provided a reliable approach to study the therapeutic mechanisms of Chinese medicines.

An approach to calculation and visualization of efficacies of Traditional Chinese Medical formulae based on a semantic network Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is widely used and tested in ethnic communities for a long history. A large number of TCM formulae, as the centralized expression of xe2x80x9ctheory, cure, recipe, and medicinexe2x80x9d, were preserved and recorded in way of relatively completed ingredients and lack of wellnoted efficacies. The main objective of this paper is to translate dosage of each herb in a TCM formula into intensity of its efficacies in a quantitative and visual way. In this study, firstly, we estimated the intensity between a herb and its efficacies quantitatively based on clinical case data, which can reflect the difference between main and secondary efficacies of a herb. Then, to calculate and visualize the interaction between different efficacies from different herbs, we have proposed a method based on the Efficacy Semantic Network (ESN). It includes three steps: (1) Simple cumulation; (2) Adjustments; (3) Main efficacies selection. We tested on a dataset of 70 TCM formulae, results show that maximum performance measure reaches 0.818 which prove that the proposed approach could help standardize existing and predict potential efficacies of TCM in a quantitative way. It shows a great potential of semantic technologies to represent, calculate and visualize the TCM knowledge. However, more efforts are still required to investigate how to represent other fuzzy and rulebased knowledge and bring more data of TCM formulae for extensive tests.