Deep learning in traditional Chinese medicine

As an alternative medicine approach, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is mainly built on an ancient understanding of the world. In order to translate the promises of TCM into modern therapies, rigorous scientific techniques are applied, which generates big data from experiments, clinical practices and medical literature. Recently, deep learning (DL) has attracted the attention of TCM researchers due to its application in data mining. In this review, we summarized recent examples of DL application in the study of TCM, including medical image processing, medicinal substances investigation, data fusion and natural language processing. We find that DL methods have considerable potential to extract valuable information from TCM data, but high-quality TCM data are still needed for further development of DL techniques. Please cite this article as: Liu LP, Yang C, Cen SX, Suo TC. Deep learning in traditional Chinese medicine. J Integr Med. 2026; 24(4):471-480.