Diagnostic-Imaging Books

I am a practicing radiologist and instructor. This text is poorly written and poorly organized.

The worst of the series. 200 cases are listed but many are repeats from earlier in the book. The questions seem random and are not always related to the case presented. Images are suboptimal, for example many of the CT images are coronal without axial images provided. What do you think you are more likely to see on boards, coronal or axial images? You are much better using Mayo Clinic GI imaging review.

This book is well written but doesn't have enough good quality pictures and is too brief in some important topics.

It's one of those books you can feel the author is really trying to teach you something and not just write some stuff. But it doesn't have enough pictures / schemes and a lot of the CT and MR images are old, poor quality and sometimes not representative. The book is one of the shortest of the requisites series and sometimes doesn't cover enough aspects of some particular topics. There's not a word about specific collateral vessels in portal hypertension.

I have had a great experience with the Mayo Clinic Gastrointestinal Imaging Review book which I would recommend instead.

despite abundant images
i found this book inaccurate, badly written and confusing
i do not recommend it at all

i think this book would serve as a good intro, but there is not enough detail regarding specific imaging characteristics of common things -- I am less interested in knowing about phytobezoars (though they are fun for the whole family!) than about MRI appearance of FNH. i need more meat. well, i'm off to lunch.

A very nice lightweight book. Not comprehensive enough for radiography students unless used as an introductory course. Computer generated anatomy art is not as detailed as other similiar textbooks and much of it is to small. Radiographs are average in quality. A great reference for limited x-ray machine operators. Cannot be used as a reference text with the exception of basic x-ray views. Clean layout and nicely arranged.

We used this text for one of our introductory courses for one year. The layout of the material is well organized and concise which we liked. However, we found the anatomy art to be difficult to relate to. Much of it was to small or the color was not appropriate to distinguish between the anatomy. For example, the anatomy on page 104 is done poorly. Radiography students need much more detail than is shown in this text. We also feel that the students need to be exposed to more than just the basic projections. The radiographs are average and we feel that students need more quality. We are returning to Merrill's for all of our courses because it is comprehensive and is the best value overall for the students.

My class was instructed that we would be using this book and in our second semester the books began to fall apart. We also found that the amount of information was lacking. With permission from our classroom and clinical instructors we are being allowed to utilize the Merrill's Atlas of Radiographic Positions and Radiologic Procedures. This has been the learning tool of Technologists for years and we switched because some one came out with a cheaper product. Just remember you pay for what you get.

One would expect that a book entitled "Atlas" would be comprehensive, with copious explanations of the physics of 3D echo, image acquistion, post-processing, and the appearance of different lesions on 3DE. If one were reading this book, one would be wrong. The chapters are cobbled together in a haphazard fashion, as if the editors were under pressure to publish and asked a bunch of different echocardiographers to write different chapters, without an underlying theme or connecting thread between them. The vast majority of the chapters are nothing more than fuzzy still images that the authors have collected -- some stills are printed in one part of the book, and then printed again later in the book, or even a few pages later in the same chapter! Additionally, the authors put in still after still of the same sort of lesion -- how many secundum ASD's do we truly need to see? Finally, there is very little text, that is, very little in the way of explanation of a given lesions's appearance on 3DE, how to acquire the image, what to look for, etc. The only saving grace of this book is one chapter on adult congenital heart disease. It alone saved the book from getting only one star.

This 220 pages book is on scanning using ultrasound as the medium and has nothing to do with the basic explanation of Ultrasound. The author(s) hardly devoted the time and the explantion of the principles on the Ultrasound. The title "Basic Ultrasound"is a misnomer. I am truly disappointed after [buying] this book.

pesad

Average book. Looks like the authors ran out of cases/images. Quite a few recycled images. This means that supposedly different entities look exactly alike and so it aint' really that useful. Mayo's review is better in my opinion. The authors need to revisit and edit it.

semi-helpful pictures (poor quality for sure). they only show one or two pictures per problem. no worth buying new. very limited text

I am a cardiology fellow and have completed my nuclear cardiology rotations and have recently taken the nuclear cardiology boards. I would not recommend this book for a fellow studying nuclear cardiology and especially not for someone who is preparing for the cardiology nuclear boards.
The book did some things quite well such as illustrations, tables, and tips on reading nuclear images. However, other books provide similar information. The biggest issue is that the book does not cover much of what I was asked about as a fellow and it did not cover multiple critical topics for the boards. For example there is no section on radiotracers and their properties to name one of many topics left out of this book.

I thought that the textbook by Iskandrian was much more helpful for the clinical side of the test and the book by Chandra was extremely helpful for the physics.

This book is written for a non-technical audience and provides a collection of rules of thumb based on practical experience but not on rigorous understanding of fundamentals. Many simplifications go too far and some explanations are outright misleading. By reading this book, a radiology tech may glean a few tips to produce a good radiograph on most systems. Yet the book may lead to fallacious intuitions. This book should not be used to gain accurate practical understanding of the physics and system design principles in radiography.

The practical rules in the book will probably work fairly well in most cases for conventional systems. New digital imaging systems may render even the practical tips obsolete since they are based on practical experience with conventional systems and not on fundamentals.

Here are some of the most egregious fallacies:

Page 10 states that radiographic images are formed thanks to the polychromatic nature of the x-ray beam: "If all of the x-rays were of the same energy, the image would be extremely poor, essentially a silhouette." In reality, the opposite is true -- a monochromatic beam with all photons carrying the same energy would provide the best image quality (tissue contrast) with best patient dose efficiency (at appropriate keV). Tissue differentiation is produced by differential attenuation of photons in tissues, even if all the photons carry identical energies. X-ray system designers go to great lengths to reduce the polychromaticity of the x-ray beam.

Page 59 states that with the doubling of the number of atoms in some space, the likelihood of x-rays hitting an atom when passing through the space also doubles. Wait a minute! What if the original likelihood of hitting an atom was 70%? Will that probability go to 140% when the number of atoms is doubled in that space? Of course, this description is incorrect. Doubling the number of atoms in a given volume will square the likelihood of the x-ray photon passing through the volume.

On page 129, the author states that "Excessive filtration in the beam defeats the purpose of exposing the radiograph. When density losses become visible, they necessitate an increase in the mAs to compensate. Such an increase in mAs simply reintroduces additional patient skin dose, which the filters were added to eliminate. ...an optimum level of protective filtration has been established to achieve maximum level of protection for the patient without affective the radopgrahic density." In reality, no such optimal level can be established. Increasing the filtration will always reduce skin dose from a polychromatic source (x-ray tube) even after the mAs is increased to maintain proper film exposure. Additional spectral filtration equivalent to 2.5 mm of aluminum is simply required by safety regulations. Anything above that is an improvement. The only limitation to adding more spectral filtration is the increased x-ray tube loading and the tube's limited maximum output. This error is particularly disturbing because it cause one to miss opportunities to reduce patient dose while improving image quality when extra mAs can be afforded or to choose to purchase a system that is less dose efficient.

The book's lack of rigor leads to the example on page 154 which states that "bone stops 40 x-rays for every x-ray stopped by soft tissue." In reality, the linear attenuation coefficient of bone is at most 2 or 3 times higher than that of soft tissue at typical x-ray energies.

I'm a neurologist. This book is very simple,summerized but not so helpful for a reference.May be, if you want to buy a neuroradiology reference book, you must be waiting for next more updating edition.