1. A method for diagnosing cardiovascular related illness, said method comprising the steps of: (a) non-invasively obtaining a signal representative of a contour of an arterial pressure pulse over a single cardiac cycle and without disturbing the natural state of the artery; (b) extracting frequency localization information and temporal localization information from said signal; (c) providing the extracted information as an input to a neural network, the neural network having been trained with a plurality of training sets, each training set correlating an arterial pressure pulse contour with a known cardiovascular or related illness; and (d) generating an illness identification output from the neural network.