About the atlas
Veterinary cytology has no complete visual reference. The print atlases and the online references cover the common entities well and the rest thinly; a pathologist facing an unusual lesion checks several books and a handful of case reports to find a single example, and often finds none. And because those references are organized by organ system, they are hard to use for disseminated diseases and for the anatomically ambiguous samples that arrive every day — a “neck mass” could be several tissues at once.
The Comparative Cytology Atlas is organized by disease entity instead. Each entity has a curated profile of where it occurs, how often, in which species and signalments, and what it looks like, with every claim tied to its sources. That profile is what the differential search ranks on. Cases — real animals, with images, signalment, site and how the diagnosis was confirmed — are evidence of what an entity can look like, including the atypical presentations that are the best teaching material. Image counts never affect ranking, and an entity with no images still appears in every differential where it belongs.
The atlas is a work in progress by design. Regions open one at a time once their skeleton of entities and site associations has been reviewed; skin and subcutis came first. Greyed entities are the contribution wish-list. Where the literature cannot support a claim, the gap is logged rather than papered over, and those gaps become study ideas.
Curators
- Dr. Melanie Ammersbach, DVM, DACVP — Curator, UC Davis - Weill School of Veterinary Medicine
- Dr. Hugues Beaufrère, DVM, PhD, DACZM — Co-curator, UC Davis - Weill School of Veterinary Medicine
A family of atlases
The atlas is a sister site of the Comparative Blood Cell Atlas, a species-first reference for normal blood cells across animal species. The two share a design and a codebase and cross-link where it helps.
Licensing and sources
Images are licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 unless otherwise noted; contributors keep their rights and grant the atlas a display license. Entity profiles are written by the curators from the published literature: facts are extracted and rewritten, never copied, and each claim cites where it came from. Suggested considerations from curated references. Not a diagnosis.
Contact: mammersbach@ucdavis.edu