A method for quantitative evaluation of an image and/or of an image sequence of tissue or tissue samples for the presence of pathological changes using a database in which there are stored pattern image data and/or pattern image data sequences of tissue patterns that have been identified as predominantly or definitely benign or malignant, and for each sample a weighting factor is stored which indicates whether the pattern occurs predominantly in benign or in malignant tissue changes; it is then analyzed whether any of the pattern images stored in the database are present, within predetermined tolerances, in the image and/or in the sequence of images; based on the sum of the weighting factors of the patterns present, an evaluation factor is formed and made available for further use or output.