Background Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) rheumatology presents unique challenges for AI-assisted clinical decision support, as the diagnostic process relies heavily on tacit knowledge and individualized reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in medical applications, they remain limited by hallucination risks and inability to replicate expert TCM reasoning. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a potential solution, yet its application to complex TCM dialectical reasoning remains underexplored. Methods We developed TCM-CoT-RAG, a hybrid framework combining RAG with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, grounded in 1,700 expert-curated clinical cases (1,600 for RAG retrieval; 100 for evaluation, including 50 for blinded expert review by three senior TCM rheumatologists). Deployed on Alibaba Cloud, the five system leverages state-of-the-art LLMs (DeepSeek-V3, Qwen3-235B) under a human-in-the-loop paradigm. We designed a dual-tier evaluation: (1) Objective extraction tasks (Task 1–2) quantified using F1-scores; (2) Generative tasks (Task 3–5) assessed using BERTScore. Two senior TCM rheumatologists (≥15 years clinical experience) blindly assessed model outputs, and a senior chief expert quantified consistency between model predictions and ground truth (GT). Comprehensive ablation studies (S1-S4, S-Skip) isolated the contributions of each CoT module. Results TCM-CoT-RAG substantially improved diagnostic accuracy across five LLMs. DeepSeek-V3 with full-chain CoT-RAG achieved Entity F1 of 44.89% (+16.45% over baseline) and Formula F1 of 32.13% (+8.74% over baseline), with BERTScore of 0.81 indicating strong semantic alignment with expert reasoning. Ablation confirmed that the complete CoT pipeline was essential—removing any reasoning module caused performance collapse below the zero-shot baseline. Two independent experts validated clinical utility (Cohen’s κ > 0.7). DeepSeek-V3 achieved the highest ground-truth consistency at 81.6%, and consistency metrics were quantified by the third expert holding the most senior professional title. Conclusion This proof-of-concept framework demonstrates the potential of RAG-enhanced CoT reasoning to improve diagnostic consistency in TCM, objectifying the Symptom-Diagnosis-Prescription pipeline. It is important to note that this system is designed as an AI-assisted clinical decision-support tool. All recommendations require validation by qualified TCM practitioners before clinical application.
Mingqian Li, Rong Du, Andrew Burton‐Jones, Jianing Xie
Purpose Grounded in signaling theory, this study examines whether traceability information displaces or complements incumbent quality cues and contrasts the relative efficacy of blockchain-enabled traceability technologies with traditional systems. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzes 18 months of product-level sales data from a global e-commerce platform using a staggered difference-in-differences design with robustness checks. We apply latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling to consumer reviews and use a synthetic difference-in-differences approach to examine shifts in consumer attention after traceability implementation. Findings Traceability information increases product sales, particularly for lower-reputation brands and diminishes the effect of electronic word-of-mouth, suggesting that diagnostic quality signals matter more than social information signals. Although blockchain-enabled traceability should enhance signal credibility, its observed impact falls short of expectations. Research limitations/implications The sample is limited to the automotive engine oil context in China. Future research should examine other categories and national contexts. Practical implications Platform managers and emerging brands can deploy low-cost traceability labels to boost demand. Blockchain solutions may require consumer education to justify higher implementation costs. Social implications Augmenting supply-chain transparency and product traceability curbs counterfeit and substandard goods, improves consumer welfare, and supports regulatory and sustainability objectives. Originality/value This study systematically assesses the substitutive and complementary roles of traceability signals in a multi-cue setting, tempers optimism about blockchain-enabled traceability and extends research on digital supply-chain transparency and signaling theory.
Saskia Hufnagel, Colin King, Alina-Theresa Schnedl, Milind Tiwari
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) bring many opportunities for artists, investors, and creators, but they also have a dark side with significant potential for use in financial crimes. Drawing on relevant caselaw, a systematic review and topic modeling of literature, we map common examples of NFT-related crime, including fraud, money laundering, theft, and market-related offenses. This empirical review lays the groundwork for the core contribution of this article, that is, application of the “crime triangle” to NFT-related crime. Recognizing heterogeneity in NFT-related crime, we detail five scenarios where such crime can occur and analyze these in the context of the crime triangle (inner and outer). This enables us to identify potential gaps and vulnerabilities in current crime prevention strategies. Given challenges in policing cybercrime, and specifically NFT-related crime, we argue that the crime triangle provides a useful heuristic tool for understanding the nature of NFT-related crime and for preventing such crime from happening.
Alternative finance platforms, including crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending, equity-based platforms, and token-based fundraising mechanisms, have become important channels for financing entrepreneurial, social, and investment-oriented initiatives. Yet their reliance on digital intermediation, dispersed participation, and information asymmetry creates opportunities for fraud, undermining trust, investor protection, and platform sustainability. This study provides a systematic review of fraud detection and prevention in alternative finance, with crowdfunding emerging as the most extensively represented empirical domain. Methodologically, the paper combines a PRISMA-guided systematic literature review with a hybrid topic-modeling strategy that integrates neural topic modeling and probabilistic refinement, thereby supporting both transparent corpus selection and data-driven thematic synthesis. The findings show that Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and blockchain-based mechanisms are recurrently discussed as promising tools for detecting, preventing, or mitigating fraud. AI and ML approaches are mainly used to identify anomalies, suspicious textual patterns, behavioral signals, and transaction irregularities, while blockchain-based approaches are associated with transparency, traceability, smart contracts, and conditional fund release. The review also shows that fraud differs across alternative finance models, ranging from campaign misrepresentation and intentional and premeditated non-delivery in crowdfunding to borrower or platform misreporting in lending-based models and misleading disclosures or white-paper manipulation in ICO/STO contexts. A central challenge across the literature is the scarcity of labeled fraud data, which limits the use and benchmarking of supervised ML models. Overall, this study contributes by linking a reproducible hybrid SLR methodology to a structured synthesis of fraud types, platform-specific vulnerabilities, and AI-, ML-, and blockchain-based detection strategies in alternative finance.