To Dx a patient, doctors take a "patient history". One goal of MolecularDiagnosis is to add to this a genetic profile. Nurses will take a quick tissue sample, drop it into PolymeraseChainReaction, sequence it, and compare the sequences to sequences from normalized population distributions to see which MendelianTrait's, including diseases and drug responses, this patient is susceptible to.

All in realtime.

The ideal scenario is:

• a patient has a genetic risk...
  • a doctor Dx's it...

    • the Dx stratifies the patient via ClusteringPatients...

      • the strata leads to an Rx...
        • the patient gets better.

The primary issue with Dx is that the doctor was not examining the patient at the exact moment they experienced the beginning of a disease. Time zero is a big mystery. The disease onset will cause symptoms, and these will cause other symptoms, in a TreeGraph shape. Every node on such a tree is a [Comorbidity], and each node occupies a trace in time from its onset until its relief. During its trace it may spawn other [Comorbidity]'s.

The PresentingSymptom was the one serious or noticeable enough for a patient to seek help, but it may be several nodes down from the actual cause.

Doctors want to attack this issue by redefining [Phenotype] to include medical history. They want to start below the root of the tree. Knowing a patient's "strata" helps narrow the set of potential symptom trees a given symptom could be a member of.

See: JournalOfBiomedicalInformatics