How Experience can be Useful in Veterinary Pathological Anatomy

Abstract

Veterinary anatomical pathology is a medical specialty very similar to human anatomical pathology. This specialty consists in diagnosing diseases, based mostly on the gross and microscopic examination of organs and tissues, obtained by surgical procedure or necropsy It consists in the application of criteria based in the knowledge of the gross and histological lesions to obtain a final pathological diagnosis. The aim of this specific diagnosis is, generally, to find which disease affects the animal, if it is alive, or what caused its death. The main difficulties in veterinary pathological diagnosis are related to the various animal species a pathologist has to deal with, the use of exhaustive classifications of different types, the costs, the subjectivity, including disagreement between the clinical and pathologic diagnoses, and the urgency in issuing the report. So the urgent need to compile all available information to obtain a diagnosis, in a short period of time, is the constant challenge placed to the professional experts in the area concerned. This chapter proposes a framework and a software system that can be useful for making diagnosis of disease. We developed the framework based on the analysis of the bibliography of the domain. Both proposals can be useful for making better diagnosis.