Customer Reviews

Nuclear Medicine Board Review: Questions and Answers for Self-Assessment

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

 

 

I am writing this review to help other cardiologists (and also other physicians and technologists) who will be taking nuclear cardiology Board exam: It will also be helpful for people taking other nuclear exams (as the basic parts are the same):

I am a interventional cardiologist and i have been in practice for 9 years and I had limited time to study. These are the books that I studied, and my recommendations are below. I hope it helps!
--------------------------------------------------------------

QUESTION BOOKS:(All 3 recommended for quick review)

1) Nuclear Medicine Board Review: Questions and Answers for Self-Assessment:
a)Good book for quick review for exam purposes (General nuclear medicine review- helpful for all fields of nuclearmedicine, not specifically cardiology).
b)Quick questions and answers on same page.
c)For cardiology, Basis of Nuclear medicine( chapters 1-3). and cardiac (Chapter 5) and PET (chapter 12)sections were helpful

2)Nuclear medicine technology: review Questions for the Board examinations (Ramer,Alavi)
a) Another good book for quick general nuclear medicine review.
b) Questions and answers, no explanations
c) For all nuclear medicine exam takers: sections on redioactivity, radipharmacy, QA, radiation safety, instrumentation, computers, patient care etc chapters very helpful)(i solved chapters 2,3,4,5,8,14,15,16)
d) there is an exam at the end

3) Nuclear medicine Exam Questions: (Andrew Kim)
a) similar to the above 2 books, good for quick review, some explanation of answers, 1/3 helpful for cardiology

------------------------------------------------------------
2) Nuclear medicine basics radiation safety course:
a) went to an 200 hour course in new Orleans, (there are 80 hour courses also and most of them are enough to get board certification in most States. for some States 80 hours may not be enough , so you need to check it)
b)Teachers were R Campeau, Lindsey,Shieau, Conant.
R. Campeau is excellent in clinical review. F.Lindsey is excellent in basics of nuclear medicine. Shieau was excellent in Radiopharmacology.
c)This is a good course, and i would strongly recommend it.
d)But it wook eight 3 day weekends and it may be very difficult to get this arranged if you have a bsy schedule. in that case, 1 week 80 hour courses should be ideal.

------------------------------------------------------------
C)Nuclear medicine Basics:
a) covered in courses well enough.
b)i bought 3 books, but i did not have enough time to read them.
c) the books i bought;
a)Nuclear Medicine basics (Chandra): very good book,key points and Questions at the endof each section are very helpful. I read some of the chapters which i had difficulty understanding. A good read for fellows who have time. Too much time consuming for practicing cardiologist who are too busy Also, a good book for any Nuclear medicine exam, or any one trying to understand the mechanisms.
key poits: (Chapters 1,2,3,4,5,8,15, and Questions: 3,11,12,14 are very good)
b) essential Nuclear medicine Physics (Powsner): his is a good book, Again, i did not have time to read it all. I read only some pages, and chapters epending on what i didin't know. if you don't have time to read the chandra book from cover to cover, I would recommend buying both 2 books, and reading the same topic on 2 books 9selective topics) to understandit better. (read maybe 20-30% of these 2 books.

-----------------------------------------------------------
D) CLINICAL BOOKS:
1) Nuclear cardiology & Correlative Imaging: A teaching file: this is an excellent book for busy clinicians. I read this book from cover to cover, and clinical cases were extremel helpful. i would strongly recommend this book! (470 pages, excellent pictures, very easy reading!)
2) There are excellent clinical textbooks, but they are not easy to read, and very time consuming. i did not have enough time.
3) Chapter on Braunwald is very good for crdiology.

------------------------------------------------------------
E)You need a letter of recommendation from a nuclear certified physician: with exact number of cases you have read. Getting the necessary numbers is not easy and is very time consuming. if you are not in fellowship, it may take 1-2 years!

--------------------------------------------------

G) Board review Courses: (ASNS Nuclear cardiology Board review Course)
a)i did not attend. But, I heard that it is very useful, especially if you can't study enough on your own.
b)But there are review questions at the end of the exam, and i got them from a freid of mine who attended. I solved these questions and some questions were exactly similar. So, i would recommend to olve these questions even if you can not go to the meeting.

H) Other Study material (For cardiologists only)
a)NCKSAP : http://www.asnc.org/section_61.cfm
vey helpful, very strongly recommended.
b)NSCA Questions: very strongly recommended:
http://www.korlak.com/ncsaweb/help/NCSA_QCReview/help.htm

---------------------------------
F) Exam:
a) is given in Prometric test center.
b) It is all computerized. images are not too bad.
c) Time is more than enough.
d) Around 170-180 questions. (less than 35 mistakes was passing (I made 17 mistakes, so it was not so difficult)
------------------------------------------------------

Good luck! i hope this helps!

Tansel Turgut

This book holds the essentials for writing exams in Nuclear Medicine. Not only does it have questons on procedures but also an Instrumentation , Pharmacy, and Quality Control areas. I would recommend this book to any student in Nuclear Medicine Technology.

Great book, I like the selection of questions, covers a lot of material in a very compact book. The main deficit I think is in the answers which are very short and not explained especially for true/false questions, it does not tell you why when a statement is false or what is false about it.

This book is informative and organized but I dont think it's very useful if you're studying for the boards. The answers are on the same page right next to the questions so it's hard to quiz yourself, most of the questions involve PET which most board questions aren't, and the boards aren't organized questions.

I used this book as I was studying for my nuclear radiology CAQ. Some of the PET questions are outdated, and I found a few typos and wrong answers to be pretty distracting. It gives a good superficial review of various topics and gave me a good reason to review the topics in a text book, but I wouldn't recommend it for those who are not already pretty familiar with nuclear radiology.

This book does have a lot of questions,but I was disappointed to find that there are no math review questions. Although I haven't taken the boards yet, I would definitely study more than just this book. It seems to have a lot more questions on CNS and PET than needed and not a whole lot of review on Thyroids.