The diagram illustrates the methodology used to diagnosed SLE and MCTD patients. The expert clinical rheumatology diagnoses were performed by Drs. Robert W. Hoffman and Eric L. Greidinger who are versed in lupus and MCTD. Both clinicians agreed on the diagnosis with their independent evaluations in all but 5 cases. In these cases, the clinicians met together, discussed the cases, and agreed on the most appropriate diagnosis. “n” represents total amount of samples, “+” and “-“ indicates positive or negative for a given criteria set, “*” includes all SLE classification criteria sets (ACR and SLICC) and “†” comprises all MCTD classification criteria rules (Alarcon-Segovia, Sharp, Kasukawa and Kahn).