Clinical diagnosis is the process by which a clinician identifies the disease or condition responsible for a patient's presentation, drawing on history, physical examination, and the pattern of signs and symptoms, and refining the conclusion with laboratory, imaging, and other investigations. It proceeds by generati…
Clinical diagnosis is the process by which a clinician identifies the disease or condition responsible for a patient's presentation, drawing on history, physical examination, and the pattern of signs and symptoms, and refining the conclusion with laboratory, imaging, and other investigations. It proceeds by generating a differential diagnosis, a ranked list of plausible explanations, and then narrowing it through hypothesis testing, in which findings are weighed for their ability to confirm or exclude candidate conditions. Diagnostic reasoning combines pattern recognition with analytical, probabilistic thinking, and is informed by the sensitivity, specificity, and predictive value of the tests employed, as well as by pre-test probability and the consequences of error. A clinical diagnosis may be provisional, working, or definitive, and is sometimes distinguished from aetiological diagnosis, which seeks the underlying cause rather than the syndromic label. Supporting evidence ranges from haematological and biochemical markers and molecular analyses to functional and imaging studies, and increasingly from computational and decision-support tools. Sound diagnosis depends on a grounding in basic and clinical sciences, careful interpretation of investigations, and awareness of cognitive and systemic sources of diagnostic error, since the accuracy and timeliness of the diagnosis directly shape prognosis and the choice of treatment.
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The 12 articles above have been cited 27 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
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