China News Service, Beijing, October 18 (Reporters Ma Shuaisha, Zhou Xin, Li Chun) Currently, the skills of old Chinese medicine practitioners are being “installed” into artificial intelligence (AI). Traditional Chinese medicine massage robot, traditional Chinese medicine meridian detector, AI pulse diagnosis... At the 2026 World Convention on Traditional Medicine held in Beijing, the digital Chinese medicine experience area attracted domestic and foreign guests to stop and experience it.
Regarding these newly developed artificial intelligence traditional Chinese medicine applications, Amir Hooman Kazemi, an Iranian "foreign Chinese medicine practitioner" and vice president of the World Federation of Acupuncture Societies, said in an interview with a reporter from China News Service that as an ancient medical technique, if acupuncture wants to be better understood and recognized around the world, in addition to relying on efficacy, it must also be explained using scientific methods, which cannot be separated from the support of advanced equipment and cutting-edge technology.
From October 17th to 18th, the 2026 World Congress of Traditional Medicine was held in Beijing. The picture shows the guests experiencing the traditional Chinese medicine massage robot on site. Photo by China News Service reporter Yi Haifei
For a long time, difficulties in inheritance, interpretation, and standardization have become the three major bottlenecks restricting the development of global traditional medicine. Experts attending the meeting believed that artificial intelligence provides a new solution from the technical level. It can "translate" the experience of traditional medicine into modern scientific language and promote traditional medicine to be better understood, verified and promoted.
Li Haiyan, director of the Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine Information of the Chinese Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, pointed out that in terms of inheritance, AI can accelerate the digital organization and structuring of traditional medical knowledge, allowing ancient books, prescriptions, and diagnosis and treatment experience to change from "storing" to "using". It can transform a doctor's personal implicit experience into explicit knowledge that can be stored and reused, and it can also transform subjective interpretations such as tongue and pulse conditions into objective quantitative data.
The "Artificial Intelligence Empowering Global Traditional Medicine Development Report" released on the 18th showed that the accuracy of AI tongue diagnosis for specific syndrome types has reached between 85% and 92%. In addition, the digital reproduction of the experience of famous doctors has taken the form of digitization of medical records to digital people and digital twins in many places, allowing individual experience to be retained, reused and shared across institutions.
AI can also promote drug research and development from experience-based medicine to rational design, and improve the efficiency of new traditional Chinese medicine research and development. Muhammad Iqbal Choudhary, an academician of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, said that traditional medicine often uses a mixture of multiple herbs, each of which contains thousands of ingredients. At the same time, a disease may be caused by a combination of abnormal biological functions. Which ingredient actually plays the role? What condition does it address? “We can use AI to identify the active ingredients in prescriptions and lock in their corresponding disease-causing biological targets.”
While artificial intelligence empowers the development of traditional medicine, it also creates new challenges. Experts believe that the imbalance of global data resources and digital capabilities may exacerbate the problem of global medical equity.
Chen Jianxin, a professor at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, pointed out that currently, the richness of traditional medical knowledge does not match its digital capabilities. If the model only relies on data training from a few areas, medical knowledge from other areas may be ignored in the algorithm.
Focusing on this governance problem, he believes that the World Health Organization can play an important role in evidence construction, data integration, standard coordination and international cooperation. Through AI tools, it can promote the integration of traditional medical experience from all over the world into the human shared knowledge system, so that the wisdom of different medical systems can be fairly presented, retrieved and shared.
"The ultimate goal of intelligentizing traditional medicine is not to export one-way technology, but to promote the mutual learning and sharing of medical wisdom from different civilizations," Li Haiyan said.
