Looking Within: How X-Ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and Other Medical Images Are Created, and How They Help Physicians Save Lives [Paperback]

Anthony Brinton Wolbarst (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520211820 | ISBN-13: 978-0520211827 | Publication Date: November 16, 1999 | Edition: 1

A hundred years ago, a doctor had no way to look within the body of a patient other than to slice it open. That changed radically at the turn of the century, with the discovery of X-rays. X-ray and other forms of diagnostic imaging technology developed slowly but steadily from then until the 1970s, at which point a revolution occurred. Made possible largely by the availability of powerful but inexpensive computers, the rapid and widespread adoption of computed tomography (CT) and, a decade later, of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) greatly expanded the power of clinical imaging, and even changed the ways in which physicians view and think about the human body.
This unique guide explains how the principal imaging devices work and how they help physicians save lives. It gives readers a grasp of the major medical technologies that might come to play important roles in their lives, and it provides succinct, easy-to-understand, and reliable explanations for those who wish to explore the issues of the associated benefits, costs, and risks in an informed manner. In nonspecialized language, Looking Within discusses how X-ray, fluoroscopic, CT, MRI, positron emission tomography (PET), ultrasound, and other medical pictures are created, and explores the essential roles they play in the diagnosis and treatment of patients. It should be of interest to patients and their friends and loved ones, and to those who are simply curious about this vitally important, exciting, and cutting-edge branch of medicine. Its brief but clear descriptions of how these essential tools work should also be of value to health care providers in supporting and educating their patients.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For most of human history, our bodies have been inscrutable, accessible only to exterior or postmortem examination. But over the past hundred years, we've found tricky ways of viewing our bones, brains, and unborn children and thus greatly enriched our health. Medical physicist Anthony Brinton Wolbarst celebrates this revolution in Looking Within, an intriguing survey of medical imaging from the early days of Roentgen to the latest developments in thermography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Writing for a general, if well-educated, audience, he guides us through the century by explaining the theories underlying each imaging technique as applied to real cases: broken bones, tumors, and heart disease all make their presence known through increasingly sophisticated technology.

The images, both reproductions and explanatory diagrams, are top-notch, lending a visual balance to the text that carries the reader through even when Wolbarst (rarely) gets a bit too technical. His experience with the National Cancer Institute and the Environmental Protection Agency broadens his range of understanding of the effects of radiological imaging on our lives, making his explanations more cogent and practical. Whether you want to gain insight into that ultrasound you have coming up or you simply want to marvel at the miracles of modern medicine, Looking Within will help you see what's really going on--just like a shoe store fluoroscope. --Rob Lightner

Review

"Should be beneficial for patients undergoing these procedures and the physicians administering them, as well as technology buffs." --Science News

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Product Details

• Paperback: 219 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520211820
• ISBN-13: 978-0520211827
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,137,534 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Anthony Brinton Wolbarst

I attended Trinity College in Hartford, and then received a PhD in solid state physics from Dartmouth with a thesis on magnetic resonance studies of point defects in crystals. After continuing that work in the US and in Johannesburg for a few years, and then doing an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in medical physics at Tufts Medical Center, I was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for three years, and then moved to the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health in D.C. While at Harvard and NCI, I developed a probabilistic approach (the Complication Probability Function) for assessing the effects of high doses of radiation on healthy tissues, to be used in radiotherapy treatment planning. I am certified by the American Board of Radiology in the three fields of radiological physics (diagnostic radiological physics, medical nuclear physics, and therapeutic radiological physics), and am Past President of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

After NIH, I joined the Environmental Protection Agency, where I led the group that provided the scientific/ technical analysis (mainly environmental pathway modeling - if some bad stuff is spilled here, how many people will suffer a cancer over time because of it) in support of the EPA's development of national standards for the cleanup of sites contaminated with radioactivity (such as commercial nuclear power plants, and the DOE's nuclear weapons production facilities). A highlight of that career was the year I spent as a LEGIS Fellow on the staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. John Glenn, who really impressed me. I was editor of Environment in Peril, Smithsonian Press (1991), which was based on a program of seminars I established that brought Jacques Cousteau, John Kenneth Galbraith, Jane Goodall, Ralph Nader, Carl Sagan, Ted Turner, and others to EPA (at no cost to tax-payers) to tell us what they considered to be the most important of environmental problems. The second volume in this series, Solutions for an Environment in Peril, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2001. During the stint at EPA, I was also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the radiation therapy department at Georgetown Medical School, and I returned to NIH for a year in there somewhere as a Program Director at the National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).

I been sole or lead author of over thirty peer-reviewed papers in medical, environmental, and solid state physics journals, and of more than a dozen Federal reports and chapters in books. I have written two textbooks, Symmetry and Quantum Systems: An Introduction to Group Representations (Van Nostrand Reinhold), and Physics of Radiology (Simon and Schuster; Second Edition 2005), both of which got nice reviews; hopefully there will be a 3rd edition by 2015. My book for the general public, Looking Within: How X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and Other Medical Images Are Created, and How They Help Physicians Save Lives, was published by the University of California Press in 1999, and it did, too. Bill Hendee and I are founding editors of an ongoing biennial series of review books entitled Advances in Medical Physics, Medical Physics Publishing, publisher for the AAPM, the third volume of which appeared in June 2010.

I retired from government in 2007, and joined the University of Kentucky College Departments of Diagnostic Radiology and Radiation Science, where my lovely wife (a computer person from Xi'an, China), 15-year-old (i.e., a teen-ager) daughter, and I live on a beautiful farm 15 miles from Lexington.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good information, easy read, January 16, 2007

By 

Tante Mommy "Tante Mommy" (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking Within: How X-Ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and Other Medical Images Are Created, and How They Help Physicians Save Lives (Paperback)

I bought this book as part of a college program I was working on. The book was easy to read and had good information in it. It's not very detailed though - more of a skim of the topic. It's written pretty much in layman's terms - no medical background needed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loking into "Looking Within", September 27, 2007

By 

Charles Bradley (Acton , MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Looking Within: How X-Ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and Other Medical Images Are Created, and How They Help Physicians Save Lives (Paperback)

This book has a lot of information about medical imaging, and it seems to be accurate.
It covers X-rays, Fluoroscopy, CT, Nuclear Medicine, Ultrasound, MRI, and others,
including possible future methods that are still in the laboratory as of 1999.
It covers the original invention and some of the improvements, including brief biographical
information about some of the principal players.

The organization is mostly historical, from X-rays to MRI, but that order seems mostly an
accident. Rather, there is a building block approach, with new ideas built on concepts
from earlier chapters. You can browse in this book, but you will get a lot more from it
by reading it front to back.

There is information about what the patient experiences with each of the imaging techniques.
The risks of each are revealed. All are low risk to no risk, but the trade-offs are
examined. For the physician, higher resolution is better, and higher contrast (more shades
of gray) is better. These good things usually take more energy, usually meaning more risk.
They also may require more money. The economics of the various technologies are also
considered. The instrument designer and the physician try to provide adequate contrast and
resolution, with lowest risk and as inexpensively as possible.

There are human interest stories, cases, about people subject to the various methods,
including why the physician selected that method. There are over 100 figures, many with
several parts. Many of the earlier figures are referred to in later chapters to reveal
additional insight.

The author is a physicist, and it shows. There is a lot of information about how the various
technologies work. It is at the "popular" level, but this physics minor of 40 yeas ago was
impressed by how well the author expressed the physics at the popular level without introducing
lies of simplification. More science writing should be this good.

It took me a while to decide on 5 stars instead of 4. Here are some complaints about the book.
They are trivial enough to not detract from the overall rating. There are many marginal notes
and side bars. Some go on for several pages. Figure captions are long and often duplicate the
information in the text. The author often does comparisons using "times less than" or "times
smaller than".

In the chapter on Computer Tomography, he mentions the Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (ART).
You do not have to understand it. Then he claims attempts to speed it up by using the Fast
Fourier Algorithm (FFA) have not been successful because of the lack of a good acronym. He means
FFT, but the joke is not funny unless you know there are alternatives to ART called, SART, MART,
and SMART.

This reviewer is praising with faint damns.

3.0 out of 5 stars Review from student, February 17, 2009

By 

Kevin O. (Livermore, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Looking Within: How X-Ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, and Other Medical Images Are Created, and How They Help Physicians Save Lives (Paperback)

I'm taking a course on radiology and this was the text assigned for the class. I think the book does a fine job at what the title states: how x-ray, MRI, US images are created and how they help save lives. It gives a good description of the history of the machines and again how the images are created. If you are looking for a book that shows you how to read and interpret these images, this is not the book to get. That's what I was hoping for when this was the required text for my radiology class.