British Journal of Radiology (2003) 76, 920
© 2003 British Institute of Radiology
doi:
Radiological imaging of the small intestine. Edited by N C Gourtsoyiannis, pp. xiii+477, 2002 (Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, Germany), £150.00 ISBN 3-540-65520-4
D F Martin
This is an enormously comprehensive book put together with diligence and what must have been an enormous amount of hard work by its editor Nick Gourtsoyiannis. The authorship is largely European and North American. Many of the usual suspects are amongst them and their biases and preconceptions are evident in the text. But this is a well balanced book covering, initially, anatomy and pathology and imaging techniques relevant to the small bowel.
The latter half of the book is dedicated to radiological evaluation of specific situations including vascular lesions, intestinal obstruction, inflammatory bowel disease, benign and malignant neoplasms, etc. This structure leads to a certain amount of duplication of information but this is not a bad thing. The book suffers a little from the inevitable delay in the editorial and publishing process in a situation where knowledge advances rapidly. The chapters on CT and MR suffer a little from this although the principles are sound and these chapters are splendidly illustrated, as are all the others. Clinical and histological aspects of small bowel disease are well represented in the text although there is relatively little on the surgical management of disease nor on the post-operative aspects of small bowel imaging. There is however more than enough between the covers of this book to inform as well as to entertain and make the most of other texts on small bowel radiology redundant.
I have personally learned quite a lot whilst reviewing this book and will no doubt continue to benefit when using it as a reference text. One of the more interesting new points is the use of the term "pinkyprinting" to describe smaller than thumbprinting mucosal nodularity in ischaemic small bowel disease. This brings the interesting prospect of a scale or grade for mucosal oedema. Why stop at pinkyprinting? Can we not have hallux printing and other grades between (index, middle, ring)? Don't you just love the descriptive power of radiological text. This book is full of that power.
