Radiography is an important tool in diagnosis of certain disorders.

Medical diagnosis (often abbreviated dx or Dx) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is simply called diagnosis when the medical context is implicit. The information required for diagnosis is typically collected from a history and physical examination of the person seeking medical care. Often, one or more diagnostic procedures, such as diagnostic tests, are also done during the process.

Diagnosis is often challenging, because many signs and symptoms arenonspecific. For example, redness of the skin (erythema), by itself, is a sign of many disorders and thus doesn't tell the physician what is wrong. Thusdifferential diagnosis, in which several possible explanations are compared and contrasted, must be performed. This involves the correlation of various pieces of information followed by the recognition and differentiation of patterns. Occasionally the process is made easy by a sign or symptom (or a group of several) that is pathognomonic.

Diagnosis is a major component of the procedure of a doctor's visit. From the point of view of statistics, the diagnostic procedure involves classification tests.

FROM WIKEPEDIA

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