The main skill in diagnosing neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease: educated guesswork. Indeed, today's doctors rely primarily on interviews, physical examination and laboratory tests to detect these complex neurological diseases; the problem is that symptoms can vary dramatically from one patient to the next, making diagnosis tricky and subjective. But by combining new databases with improved medical-imaging techniques able to resolve telltale anatomical features a millimeter in size or less, researchers are starting to make the invisible visible, potentially enabling them to offer patients earlier and more accurate diagnoses.

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