Customer Reviews

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [With CDROM]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is perfect for the new researcher trying to get a good grasp of the principles of fMRI. It covers the concepts, the engineering and experimental design of fMRI scanners and the studies they can be used for. The explanations are clear and made clearer still by the excellent use of analogy and pleasing diagrams. It even covers the basics of experimental design which really helps the novice. The book also comes with data sets which allow one to try out ones image processing skills.

This book is highly recommended for those studying for higher degrees and is almost unique in that it is far more accessible than any of its rivals. Highly recommended.

We use the book to teach advanced undergraduate and early graduate students on the principles of MR. The book is very high quality, thoughtful, and we are delighted to use it in teaching.

Kudos to the authors for finding a way to teach this dense material. For the most part the text was readable and helped me understand material which is quite frankly far out of my domain of expertise, though I was sometimes frustrated by the fact that important points sometimes seemed to get muddled because of unclear terminology or other unclear presentation. For example: "If k-space is sampled across a wide field of view but with a limited sampling rate, the resulting image will have a small field of view but high resolution." What?? I have been staring at this for an hour. How can something have simultaneously a wide and narrow FOV? Does k-space have its own FOV (their definition on the preceding page of FOV seems to limit it to image space, not kspace!)? I'm sure a seasoned expert will know what this means, but it makes me want to tear my hair out. This always seemed to happen at the most important points in the book on the nights where I needed desperately to understand the one sentence. If there were more/better supplementary materials, I would give it 4 stars. It would help a lot if the website had animations or other interactive materials. I saw an animation on a website and it made me understand a concept in 30s that I could not understand after many hours of reading this book.

I am a first-year Masters student in Cognitive Psych. and just getting into using fMRI as my method. As no course was offered on fMRI techniques, I borrowed this book from my supervisor and read through it on my own. I have to say it is an exceptional introduction to fMRI, even if you've already read a lot of fMRI-based research papers. This book gets into the nitty-gritty details of the physical basis of the fMRI signal, the biological basis of the hemodynamic response, and then proceeds nicely into an in-depth look at different methodologies, preprocessing, statistical analysis, selective reviews of various fields of research, and common blunders that you don't want to make when designing your own multi-thousand-dollar fMRI study (which they all tend to be). In short, it gives you almost everything you need to know when just starting out in fMRI, and an excellent base to build on with future research and interaction with colleagues using the same methods.

I can't recommend it enough to anyone new to fMRI who wants a good grounding in the field. Before I read it I felt like I knew nothing about my own field; now I feel confident designing and executing my own first fMRI project.

Recommended for all grad students focusing on fMRI (or super-ambitious undergrads). Kudos to Huettel, Song and McCarthy.

Nicely formatted for those who want a thorough explanation but don't have much background in MR physics

This book is an excellent introduction of functional MRI with many pictures and diagrams, and nicely updated, for example, descriptions and pictures about head coils, compared with the former version. It covers comprehensive topics regarding the functional MRI. I strongly recommended this book to grad-students, post-docs, and any trainees who may consider using fMRI as a research tool.

The text presents a solid overview of fMRI and would make an excellent text for advanced undergrauate/graduate courses if teaching materials were available. Sinauer, the publisher has taken a position that teaching materials will only be made available to those who may guarentee the purchase of ten or more books, which is a understandable in most university settings. However, when explaining that the courses I teach are conducted overseas (PR China) I was referred to their British Distributor, who must again insure that arrangements have been made to purchase the magical number of ten textbooks. I offered to pay for any teaching materials, but was refused with the caveate that the use of any illustrations from the text, even for the purposes of teaching, would require prior approval of Sinauer's copywrite office.

If ones daily pursuits focus on research and the sharting of knowledge, the Sinauer books are of a high quality, but there are other texts from other publishers, i.e., Psychology Press, who are more willing to work with those of us interested in sharing knowledge, as opposed to those more interested in profiting from it.

Product looks good and fits the description that was given. I am very satisfied with my purchase!

This is the perfect book for those that are longing for some clear-easy-reading book about Functional MRI!
Highly recomended!