Meridian theory is a major part of Chinese medicine and has guided acupuncture and clinical practice for thousands of years. Meridian theory describes many important concepts about the rules of human body function and regulation, but has comparatively huge differences with the basic concepts of modern medicine. These differences have caused deep concern and attracted attention from scholars, both inside and outside of China. The interest in meridian theory lies in determining the structural nature of meridians. Not only is this information still unclear, it is very difficult to achieve clear results in a short period of time. Despite this, the phenomena of meridians can be used as the entry point for meridian studies. After many years of effort, although the physical structure of meridians has not been found, the existence of the meridian phenomena has been fully confirmed. Although there is a lack of morphological evidence for the existence of the meridian, concluding non-existence may be incorrect as morphology techniques develop and structures previously not determined are being found. Since the phenomenon of meridians exists, some biological basis behind its occurrence must be present. This implies that research on meridians needs to continue as research techniques advance and may eventually reveal the biological basis of the meridian phenomenon. In the present review, we analyze the history of meridian studies in China.

Acupuncture is widely used in clinical practice. According to traditional acupuncture theory, the Neiguan acupoint (PC6) is one of the most commonly used acupoints and is indicated for treating cardiovascular-related disorders. We present the case of a 27-year-old female who had been diagnosed with ventricular septal defect and had undergone surgery to repair the defect at the age of 11 years. The patient had no obvious symptoms, such as palpitations and difficulty breathing. However, while performing electrocardiography (ECG), we found that she suffered from arrhythmia, and therefore, we treated her by acupuncture at the left PC6. An ECG monitor was used to record data during the entire acupuncture procedure, which was divided into the following three segments: prior to, during, and after acupuncture. Various indices of heart rate variability (HRV) were then determined and analyzed. The results indicate that acupuncture can regulate the HRV effectively; however, more studies are needed to confirm this finding.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to investigate the change of mean blood flux in Hegu acupoint after contralateral Hegu acupoint was stimulated. Methods: Healthy volunteers (N=140) were placed in a temperature-controlled room as a resting state for 60 minutes. Then the measurements of skin blood flow were carried out in pre- and postacupuncture stimulation every 30 minutes over a total of 180 minutes using a Moor full-field laser perfusion imager. The change ratio of mean blood flux in Hegu acupoint was used to evaluate the contralateral stimulation effect in different groups. Results: After acupuncture of the right Hegu acupoint (AR), the change ratio of mean blood flux in the left Hegu acupoint was increased significantly compared with the control group 60 minutes after acupuncture stimulation (p<0.01). Then the blood flow in the AR group was sustained at a higher level compared with that of the control group (p<0.05). However, the change ratio of mean blood flux in the right Hegu acupoint increased significantly in the 30 minutes after contralateral acupuncture stimulation (p<0.01). From that point on, the change ratio was sustained at a higher level in the AR group than in the control group until 150 minutes after stimulation (p<0.05). Conclusions: On stimulation of either the left or right side of Hegu acupoint, the change ratio of mean blood flux was increased in the contralateral Hegu acupoint in a period from 30, 60, to 150 minutes after stimulation, respectively.

In this article, the decentralized fuzzy inference method (DFIM) is applied to reconstruct the distributions of surface laser power and internal temperature of the biological tissue during laser-induced thermal therapy. The Pennes bioheat equation is used to describe the heat transfer in the tissue with laser irradiation, and it is solved by finite volume method. The reconstruction task is formulated as an inverse problem which is solved by the DFIM. Reconstruction results demonstrate that the DFIM can accurately reconstruct the surface laser power and internal temperature distribution of the tissue. Furthermore, the influences of the number of measurement points, laser irradiance form and measurement error on reconstruction results are discussed. Retrieval results showed that the DFIM is robust to reconstruct different forms of laser irradiances and internal temperature fields, even with noisy data.