Looking Within: How X-Ray, Ct, Mri, Ultrasound, and Other Medical Images Are Created, and How They Help Physicians Save Lives

This book has a lot of information about medical imaging, and it seems to be accurate. It covers X-rays, Fluoroscopy, CT, Nuclear Medicine, Ultrasound, MRI, and others, including possible future methods that are still in the laboratory as of 1999. It covers the original invention and some of the improvements, including brief biographical information about some of the principal players. The organization is mostly historical, from X-rays to MRI, but that order seems mostly an accident. Rather, there is a building block approach, with new ideas built on concepts from earlier chapters. You can browse in this book, but you will get a lot more from it by reading it front to back. There is information about what the patient experiences with each of the imaging techniques. The risks of each are revealed. All are low risk to no risk, but the trade-offs are examined. For the physician, higher resolution is better, and higher contrast (more shades of gray) is better. These good things usually take more energy, usually meaning more risk. They also may require more money. The economics of the various technologies are also considered. The instrument designer and the physician try to provide adequate contrast and resolution, with lowest risk and as inexpensively as possible. There are human interest stories, cases, about people subject to the various methods, including why the physician selected that method. There are over 100 figures, many with several parts. Many of the earlier figures are referred to in later chapters to reveal additional insight. The author is a physicist, and it shows. There is a lot of information about how the various technologies work. It is at the "popular" level, but this physics minor of 40 yeas ago was impressed by how well the author expressed the physics at the popular level without introducing lies of simplification. More science writing should be this good. It took me a while to decide on 5 stars instead of 4. Here are some complaints about the book. They are trivial enough to not detract from the overall rating. There are many marginal notes and side bars. Some go on for several pages. Figure captions are long and often duplicate the information in the text. The author often does comparisons using "times less than" or "times smaller than". In the chapter on Computer Tomography, he mentions the Algebraic Reconstruction Technique (ART). You do not have to understand it. Then he claims attempts to speed it up by using the Fast Fourier Algorithm (FFA) have not been successful because of the lack of a good acronym. He means FFT, but the joke is not funny unless you know there are alternatives to ART called, SART, MART, and SMART. This reviewer is praising with faint damns.

I bought this book as part of a college program I was working on. The book was easy to read and had good information in it. It's not very detailed though - more of a skim of the topic. It's written pretty much in layman's terms - no medical background needed.