First of all, it is quite dangerous to conclude to something being a lesion just based on visual examination of gross tissue. Especially in the lungs, where pre-mortem vascular congestion, euthanasia-related hemorrhage or post-mortem blood pooling can cause significant color variation. Palpation of the lung tissue is a crucial part of gross examination, which you lose with only visual appearance. But without doing histology, results based on gross appearance will always be dubious, even with access to palpation, Results based on photography of gross appearance will be even more dubious. I have no knowledge of software that would allow to do that, and very much doubt that anything like that exists. I suppose that someone who is skilled at Image J or ImagePro could write programs to detect areas of color difference in photographs, which would only work if your photographs are of extremely good quality, with constant illumination, focus and exposure from animal to animal. But even in that case, that would just indicate areas of color difference, it certainly couldn't classify the pathology of the changes, because that requires histology and examination by a qualified pathologist.

Jean-Martin, palpation will not work, because they are small animal lungs. And we could not do histology, since they are also used for CFU and other stuff. I just want a gross evaluation. I will look into Image J and ImagePro. Thank you for your help.

I used Image J to analyze color patterns on the snakes. I did my measurements manually, but I believe there is a feature that allows for autocounts. You might want to check their website http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/.

Saludos!

Mike

Lesions should be defined by their micro-architecture. Take a piece of them  and  submit them to histology.

Image Pro software

I need to strongly second the statements of Jean-Martin as regards this and emphasize that unless you do histopathological analysis of at least some of your gross lesions your results will be dubious at best. With proper experimental planning and knowledge of the disease distribution in the lung lobes (particularly possible in the case of widely disseminated or multifocal patterns) you can designate a lung lobe consistently for pathology.  You then tie it off and formalin fix it separately. This leaves the other lobes for use in other analyses. This is done regularly for ferrets and even mice so certainly might be done for rabbits.  Then you can do gross/histo correlates for every animal in your study. 

Dear Isabella,

I agree with Jean. Depending of the euthanasia that you are using you can have artifacts that mimic real lesions (for example barbiturates, create areas of vascular congestion that can mimic areas of hemorrhage “peracute vascular congestion due to the barbiturates”). This pseudo-lesions (artifact) need to be discerned by a pathologist. Even as pathologists, we described as possible lesions when based on gross (macroscopic findings), before the lesion are concluded as such by histopathology.

Just to add some "spice" to the other pathologists that are present in this conversation. For ex. the IMPC designations of gross pathology are only ontologies: one describes, color, shape, consistency etc of a lesion. That's it. Then, as Anders said,  the histopathology of the lesion reveals the final diagnosis.

There are some scoring systems trying to digitalize histological lesions, and immunohistochemical ones (nr of a certain cell type) but not concludent for macroscopical ones.