Ingo N. Springer and Franz Haerle

Diagnostic radiology has made tremendous strides over the past 25 years. Today, we are able to image the entire human body within minutes, depicting both soft tissues and hard tissues in the same image. Computer-assisted three-dimensional reconstruction of radiological data provides images that are impressive and quite reliable, but at the same time they tempt us to forget the living correlate: the patient. In most cases this may even be admissible; however, it still appears to be beneficial to keep our set of clinical tools complete and begin our investigation with a thorough examination of the patient, prior to deciding a course of action.