OBJECTIVE:To investigate the relationship be-tween the cardiotonic activity of Fuzi(Radix Aconiti Lateralis Preparata,RALP)and its fingerprint deter-mined by liquid chromatography-mass spectrome-try(LC-MS).METHODS:First,the fingerprints of six processed products of RALP were established by high perfor-mance liquid chromatography quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometry(HPLC-Q-TOF-MS)followed by analysis of the principal component of the relative peak area of its common peaks.Next,the scores of the first five principal components were used as input for an artificial neural network(ANN).Additionally,the therapeutic effect of RALP was assessed by measuring the hemodynamic in-dexes of heart failure model rats.Subsequently,flu-orescence semi-quantitative polymerase chain re-action and an enzyme-linked immunosorbent as-say kit were used to determine the effects of RALP-processed products on the serum levels of noradrenaline(NA),angiotensin-Ⅰ(Ang-Ⅰ),and the expression of β-norepinephrine receptor mRNA(β-NRm)in the rat cardiac tissues.P＜0.05 was used as the output of the ANN.Finally,a network was constructed to display the relationship between the LC-MS fingerprints and the cardiotonic activity of the RALP-processed products.RESULTS:Several types of RALPs can improve dia-stolic function,systolic function and heart rate.On the basis of the findings from the principal compo-nent analysis(PCA)of 16 common peaks of finger-prints of six RALP-processed products,it was re-vealed that the first five principal components may include 100％of the information of the original da-ta.As observed from the multilayer perceptron neu-ral network analysis,principal component 4 pre-sented with the strongest effects on serum levels of NA and Ang-Ⅰ in rats,while principal component 1 exerted the greatest effect on β-NRm expression in cardiac tissue.CONCLUSION:The key findings obtained from this study indicated that the network constructed by the PCA-ANN may predict pharmacodynamic ef-fects of the main ingredients of Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM).This method may serve as a new approach to identify the relationship between LC-MS fingerprints and the pharmacodynamic ef-fects of TCM ingredients.