British Journal of Radiology (2003) 76, 282-283
© 2003 British Institute of Radiology
doi:
Diagnostic and interventional neuroradiology: a multimodal approach. By K Sartor, pp. 402, 2002 (Thieme Medical Publishers, Stuttgart, Germany), €99.00 ISBN 3 13 1300817
A Jackson
This small and relatively compact text is just over 400 pages in total. It aims to provide an overview of the whole of modern Neuroradiology for the non-expert. The book is a carefully edited conglomeration of contributions from 48 separate authors but the editor has done a large amount of work to try and seamlessly blend these contributions with considerable success.
The book starts with a 50 page section on methodology, which includes cerebral ultrasound and nuclear medicine techniques and a very nice section on normal brain maturation on MR. This is then followed by 5 sections, the first on cerebral pathology, the second on spinal diseaes, the third on neuromuscular diseases and the fourth and fifth on endovascular treatment for cerebral and spinal disease. Each of these sections is divided in a logical structure based on the pathology. The section on cerebral disease deals with malformations and developmental abnormalities traumatic lesions, tumours and tumour-like diseases, vascular diseases, infections and inflammations, demyelination and degenerative disease and finally iatrogenic lesions. These sections are typically in the region of 40 pages or so and are carefully structured with a series of easily identifiable subheadings, which make parsing of the text and reference to the text extremely easy. In keeping with a book of this size the descriptions of the individual diseases are not comprehensive but do include, in a very concise form the majority of the clinical information, which would be needed by a non-specialist attempting to deal with neuroradiological investigations. On the whole the text seems to be written by experts in the field and is up to date and extremely well illustrated with good quality illustrations which are also well annotated and described. The book does describe radiological signs in the individual diseases although there is no real guide to differential diagnosis, which would in fact be well outside the scope of the book. The individual sections are reasonably well referenced and the choice of references on the whole appears to be good. I was particularly pleased to see that the authors have identified and discussed in detail very simple and common errors which tend to made, such as the misidentification of spinal nerve route levels involved in degenerative disease making this a very useful book for the trainee or non-radiologist.
It is easy to criticize a book of this type by saying that none of the sections are dealt with in particular detail, however that is clearly not the purpose of this book which in my opinion provides a valuable desktop reference for the general radiologist and non-radiologist into neuroradiological diseases. I would heartily recommend this book for the departmental bookshelf and have added it to our recommended reading list for the FRCR.
