Network Patterns of Herbal Combinations in Traditional Chinese Clinical Prescriptions.

As a well-established multidrug combinations schema, traditional Chinese medicine (herbal prescription) has been used for thousands of years in real-world clinical settings. This paper uses a complex network approach to investigate the regularities underlying multidrug combinations in herbal prescriptions. Using five collected large-scale real-world clinical herbal prescription datasets, we construct five weighted herbal combination networks with herb as nodes and herbal combinational use in herbal prescription as links.