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In medicine, a differential diagnosis is the distinguishing of a particular disease or condition from others that present similar clinical features.[1] Differential diagnostic procedures are used by physicians and other trained medical professionals to diagnose the specific disease in a patient, or, at least, to eliminate any imminently life-threatening conditions. Often, each individual option of a possible disease is called a differential diagnosis (for example, acute bronchitis could be a differential diagnosis in the evaluation of a cough that ends up with a final diagnosis of common cold).

More generally, a differential diagnostic procedure is a systematic diagnostic method used to identify the presence of a disease entity where multiple alternatives are possible. This method is essentially a process of elimination or at least a process of obtaining information that shrinks the "probabilities" of candidate conditions to negligible levels, by using evidence such as symptoms, patient history, and medical knowledge to adjust epistemic confidences in the mind of the diagnostician (or, for computerized or computer-assisted diagnosis, the software of the system).