The concept of real-world studies (RWS has emerged in recent years, differing from traditional randomized controlled trials (RCT) in both design and implementation. Real world data and evidence have become increasingly important in the fields of medical and health decision-making. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a particular kind of medical science reliant on real-world clinical practices and evidence. Real-world evidence plays an important role in promoting the individualized application of TCM diagnoses and treatment regularities for personalized medicine with optimal effectiveness.

With the development of big data, artificial intelligence, and other information technologies, modern technology provides the platform and conditions for real world research. The progress of big data analysis methods provides opportunities for the collection, preprocessing, and analysis of real-world TCM clinical data. Therefore, big data and artificial intelligence techniques, when integrated with real-world data, are vital in proving the effectiveness and safety of TCM. Specifically, they are suitable for distilling empirical knowledge from highly experienced TCM physicians and finding out the diagnosis and characteristics and regularities of TCM treatment for chronic diseases. In addition, RWS are suitable for the evaluation of new drugs based on classical prescription and the efficacy of non-drug TCM therapy, furthering our understanding of clinical indications and improving the level of rational use.

This Special Issue will focus on topics relating to TCM and covering real-world big data and artificial intelligence techniques and applications, such as real-world data collection, text mining of electronic medical records, medical terminologies and knowledge graphs, data mining and artificial intelligence algorithms and applications, and translational biomedical informatics for TCM diagnosis and treatment. We welcome both original research, including methodology research and real-world based clinical research, and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Real-world curation and processing of TCM data
• Quality control and processing of real-world TCM data
• Clinical terminologies and information standards for real-world TCM data
• Big data analysis platforms and applications for real-world TCM data
• Data warehousing and decision support for real-world TCM data
• Text mining algorithms and applications for electronic medical records
• Novel artificial intelligence applications for real-world TCM data
• Clinical effectiveness evaluation studies based on real-world TCM data
• Translational biomedical informatics for TCM diagnosis and treatment