Customer Reviews

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

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.