Exploring Homoeopathic System of Medicine Using Network Science
Published:
Exploring Homoeopathic System of Medicine Using Network Science by Muniba Firdous (2016)
Network science is a dynamic field of study that deals with understanding various net- works in nature with the help of a unified set of methods and tools. Network medicine is an emerging field under the umbrella of network science that helps in identifying, treating and preventing diseases through network dynamics. Network analysis is being used as a mechanism to help identify human disease related causes, drug targets to help cure diseases and prevention through spread of diseases with the help of network topologies. In this dissertation, we propose the network science a useful paradigm to explore the homeopathic system of medicine as network medicine system. We use the repertory of homeopathic medicine to construct the bipartite network of symptoms and medicines and apply different network analysis measures to explore this system of medicine through analysis of visualized network. First we perform analysis on the network mainly for making the prescription of medicine easy through finding highly prescribable medicine from network for a set of related symptoms. Secondly we visualize and analyze the bipartite network for picturing the Drug Profile. We also study the medicine-medicine one-mode projection of bipartite Symptom-Medicine network to analyze the mutual behavior of the medicines with social network theories. At the end we use networks community module for the prediction and detection of homeopathic compounds. The overall analysis of the network in both bipartite and one-mode projection reveals that our proposed approach to study the Symptom-medicine network from homeopathic system of medicine is successful for all the proposed hypotheses and the use of networks for this field is of significant importance for academic, clinical and research field.