The use of digital technology to asses the severity of the Experimental Allergic Encephalomyelitis (EAE) spinal cord lesion

Experimental Allergic Encephalomyelitis (EAE) is an autoimmune demyelinating disease of the central nervous system drat is widely accepted as an animal model for the human multiple sclerosis (MS.). Since the EAE is also characterized by inflammation in the form of perivascular cuffing, we hypothesized that measuring the number of the inflammatory cells might correlate with the clinical signs and symptoms of the disease and could bring more understanding to the EAE different degrees of the inflammatory process. The model chosen to test this hypothesis was the EAE induced in Lewis rat. The 16 animals were administered Myelin Basic Protein (MBA) plus complete Freund's adjuvant and examined daily in a blind fashion for the signs of MS. Twenty-nine days later, animals were sacrificed and tissues from the spinal cord and were collected for Hematoxylene and Eosin histological studies using the Image-Pro-Plus digital morphomtry technique. We concluded that EAE inflammation can be classified into mild, moderate and severs lesion based on the lymphocytes number which correlate with the clinical presentation of the diseased animal.