Medical Diagnosis Task
A Medical Diagnosis Task is a diagnosis task that is a clinical mapping from a patient’s data (normal and abnormal history, physical examination, and laboratory data) to a nosology of disease states.
- Context:
- It can (typically) be an output of a Medical Diagnosing Task.
- …
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Medical Diagnostics, Medical Sign, Symptom, Medical History, Physical Examination, Diagnostic Test, Differential Diagnosis.
References
2021
- (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_diagnosis#Types Retrieved:2021-12-22.
- Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, [1] Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being 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 medical tests, are also done during the process. Sometimes posthumous diagnosis is considered a kind of medical diagnosis.
Diagnosis is often challenging, because many signs and symptoms are nonspecific, and can only be undertaken by registered and licensed health professionals. For example, redness of the skin (erythema), by itself, is a sign of many disorders and thus does not tell the healthcare professional what is wrong. Thus differential 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.
- Medical diagnosis (abbreviated Dx, [1] Dx, or Ds) is the process of determining which disease or condition explains a person's symptoms and signs. It is most often referred to as diagnosis with the medical context being 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 medical tests, are also done during the process. Sometimes posthumous diagnosis is considered a kind of medical diagnosis.
- ↑ See List of medical abbreviations: D for variants.
2016
- (Miller, 2016) ⇒ Randolph A. Miller. (2016). “Diagnostic Decision Support Systems.” In: Clinical decision support systems, pp. 181-208 . Springer, Cham,
- QUOTE: ... A simple definition of diagnosis is: (Miller, 1990)
- the placing of an interpretive, higher level label on a set of raw, more primitive observations [Definition 1].
- By this definition one form of diagnosis might consist of labeling, as “abnormal” any laboratory test results falling outside 1.5 times the 95% confidence intervals for the “normal” values seen in the general population as measured by that laboratory. Another level of diagnosis under the same definition might consist of labeling the combination of a low serum bicarbonate level, a high serum chloride level, and an arterial blood pH of 7.3 as “metabolic acidosis.”
- A more involved definition of diagnosis, specific for clinical diagnosis, is: (Miller, 1990)
- a mapping from a patient’s data (normal and abnormal history, physical examination, and laboratory data) to a nosology of disease states [Definition 2].
- Both of these definitions treat diagnosis improperly as a single event, rather than as a process.A more accurate definition is found in the Random House Collegiate Dictionary. There, diagnosis is defined as: (Flexner & Stein, 1988)
- “the process of determining by examination the nature and circumstances of a diseased condition” [Definition 3].
- Skilled diagnosticians develop an understanding of what the patient’s life situation was like before the illness began, how the illness has manifested itself, and how it has affected the life situation. (Miller, 1990)
- QUOTE: ... A simple definition of diagnosis is: (Miller, 1990)
1990
- (Miller, 1990) ⇒ R.A. Miller. (1990). “Why the standard view is standard: people, not machines, understand patients’ problems." In: J Med Philos 1990;15
1988
- (Flexner & Stein, 1988) ⇒ S.B. Flexner and J. Stein, eds. (1988). “The Random House college dictionary, revised edition." New York: Random House, Inc.