British Journal of Radiology 75 (2002),785 © 2002 The British Institute of Radiology
Paediatric Chest Imaging. Ed by J Lucaya and J L Strife, pp. 308, 2002 (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany), £137.50 ISBN 3-540-67527-2
D Pilling
This book, which is part of the Medical Imaging series from Springer, deals with an important area of paediatric radiological practice. The authors deliberately deal mainly with cross-sectional imaging and concentrate on producing excellent images, although this is not quite an atlas.
The first chapter is devoted to ultrasound, giving it a prominence not usually expected in text about the chest. It does, however, point out how valuable ultrasound can be in pleural diseases and some unusual pulmonary abnormality. There is a good overview of nuclear medicine in an appropriate section. The section on helical CT gives practical hints about managing children, which will be very useful to those seeing relatively few children, and discusses the advantages of this technique over conventional CT. High resolution CT of the chest is comprehensively reviewed. The remainder of the book is devoted to pathology-based chapters, although there is obviously some repetition and overlap with the technique-based chapter at the start of the book.
This book makes a valuable contribution in this fast advancing area of paediatric diagnosis and will be much used by all involved in paediatric chest disease and those wondering about the relative merits of different cross-sectional imaging techniques within the chest. This book can be thoroughly recommended.
