Customer Reviews

Medical Instrumentation Application and Design

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

 

 

It was with great enthusiasm that we ordered the 3rd edition of Professor's Webster big hit. With all my respects for Professor Webster, I was personally disapointed to observe that this edition has almost the same content as the second one. Maybe it is worth mentioning that I have adopted this text for my bioinstrumentation course from the very first edition. It is amazing that some of the very good and recent works done by Prof. Webster's team of engineers and students was not at all included. Even the references are almost the same as the second edition. As the second edition had really something to say compared to the first one, the natural expectation was to see a 3rd edition much more elaborated in terms of novelties in the field. The amount of new material put into this edition seems not to justify the publication of the 3rd edition.

This book is not the best as a textbook. Might be useful as a refresher or reference, but that's not what I had to use it for. It is wordy and is sometimes too detailed and sometimes not enough. It has no consistency, thanks to numerous authors. Also, the material is often outdated. Time to look for a different book.

As a coursebook, I found 'Medical Instrumentation' to be a sound survey of electrical medical diagnostic instrumentation. The book does review electrical therapeutic medical instrumentation; however, it's coverage is not as thorough.

This is an excellent resource for engineers planning to specialize in medical device design.

A good understanding of physiology is necessary to fully utilize the Medical Instrumentation text. If you have little medical background, I recommend Review of Medical Physiology (by William Ganong) as a companion.

The book scans through many topics related to Bomedical Instrumentation. It gives you just a general idea of what this is about, but if you want to get serious details about anything mentioned, you will need a second source for everything, as nothing is explained or treated in enough detail. Wikipedia is more informative than this book for many of the topics.
For example, the chapter about operational amplifiers is just a useless list of what the amps can do, but nothing really useful and complete on how to use them. The chapter about biopotentials is a bit better, though incomplete. The description of electrodes is incomplete. You just get a huge list of articles you should read to really learn something out of your time and effort.
For the amount of topics it pretends to cover and the thin detail offererd, this book seems like a big table of contents to me, not a reference at all. I don't know of a better book on Biomed Instrumentation, though. I should write one =)

Explains dynamic characteristics of circuits very well. It has a ton of information - which can be too much. If you are just starting out in a course on instrumentation, I would recommend, "Principles of Bioinstrumentation" by Normann. His book is much simpler. Ideally, you should get both,..., it depends what level you are at (as a 4th year bioengineering student, I preferred the simple version...)

It's not bad. Extremely detailed and really does a good job explaining how medical devices work, but its not up to date. Most references for the chapters are from the 1960s/70s, which is good because it references the original work. I think an updated version would helpful.

If you start from scratch and you want to learn designing medical instrumentation, this book will leave you wanting for much more, especially if you wish to design the electronics too. On the whole, this book can be considered a collection of monographies of dishomogeneous complexity and detail level.

For instance, the section on electronics (a measly thirty pages or so) is desperately basic and useless to conjure up any serious application. If you can design a half-decent biopotential amplifier, you don't need to read it, and if you are a medical practitioner wanting to understand more about the innards of your equipement you will find it too technical, because it looks like a copy/paste from an electronics student manual. So why bother inserting it in the first place?

The remaining sections actually do better, are more or less informative and will give you a fairly good overview of the toys of the trade. The section on biopotential and electrodes I found useful and interesting, but on the whole this book is very far from being a standalone solution, or even a reference text. Some parts will never be of interest for you, whatever your field is, and other ones require a lot of further reading.

I don't quite understand whom was it written for: it is too technical for the layman, too uneven and scattered for the student and too generic for the specialist. And the price doesn't help.

It talks about a lot of things, but issues are about one paragraph; thus, it's not very good for understanding the equipment in depth. You should get to know general instrumentation and engineering beforehand. This might be something that prompts interest, but it doesn't quite help you develop anything, and you will definitely need a refresher of undergraduate engineering.

This book is more of a reference book, not a textbook! Although it contains some vital information it is a very poor textbook, although the cover is nice and attractive. Don't be fooled!

I ordered the thrid edition, hardcover version of this book, I got the India edition of the book. It is page for page the same as the hardcover book, it is just cheaper qaulity. The pages are falling out of the binding and they easily rip.

The contents of the book are actually pretty cool. As far as engineering textbooks go, it is not that bad. Just make sure you are getting what you paid for.