Health is priceless, but health care has a budget. In the era when the dream of personalized medicine may become a reality, there are not enough resources to allow the best diagnostic or therapeutic strategy in every situation. An individual is by defini-tion different from all others. Because medicine is not an exact science that can always predict the best imaging modality for evaluation of patients, medical decisions are made on a probabilis-tic evaluation. The value of a procedure should be estimated on the basis of parameters such as risk stratification, diagnostic accuracy, prog-nostic value, impact on management, duration of the diagnostic evaluation, and treatment. Therefore, the cost has to be estimated for the entire diagnostic and therapeutic course, not only for the single diagnostic procedure. With the increasing cost of health care, decisions should be based on a careful cost-effectiveness evaluatio
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