Atlas of gray scale ultrasonography

Ultrasound Volume

in medicine

3B: engineering

aspects

Edited by D. White and R. W. Brown Plenum

Press (1977)

xxix + 1024~~.

$90

If anyone needs to be convinced of the shear volume of work being undertaken in medical applications of ultrasound, let them peruse this volume. This massive book contains almost 1000 pages devoted to the 167 non-clinical papers presented at the combined 1976 meetings of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine, the World Federation for Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, and the Societas Internationalis pro Diagnostica Ultrasonica in Ophthalmologia. The major part of the volume is approximately equally divided into three sections: ‘Doppler I’echniques’ contains most aspects of modern research, such as development of advanced signal processing techniques, instrumental development, Doppler imaging, novel applications of standard methods and fundamental investigation of scattering processes in blood. ‘New Techniques’ is concerned with grey- (and colour-) scale system design and displays, synthetic aperture and multi-element techniques, real-time scanners, signal and image processing, and tissue characterization studies. ‘Tissue Interactions’ deals with tissue characterization, tissue parameter measurement, and with ultrasound bio-effects. A short section entitled ‘Standardization’ contains papers on system performance, standardization and output measure. ments. The contributions from the various participating organizations have, sensibly, not been kept separate, and are classed together within the respective divisions. This is bound to have fruitful results, and the reader may discern for himself the different direction which some developments in ultrasound ophthalmology have taken, particularly for tissue characterization and system assessment. The subjects covered represent a very mixed bag indeed, and it is unlikely that any reader can be so versatile and leisurely that he will find the time to consider them all. But a study of the book will, at least, reward him with a relatively up-to-date and reasonably comprehensive overall impression of developments in the fields covered. The editors aver, in a preface, that the sections on Doppler methods and new techniques, in particular, will prove stimulating to the serious student, and that is certainly true for some of the papers. On the other hand, the space devoted to any presentation apparently bears little relationship to its interest, originality, or merit; more than half of the published papers are merely the abstracts of short communications, less than three pages in length. The latter convey only a rudimentary idea of the research involved, and it is questionable whether one should be invited to spend US $90 on a book whose bulk is so padded out by such relatively unusable material - not to mention the 63 totally blank pages incorporated within the main body of the text.

ULTRASONICS.

JANUARY

1979

It is impossible to comment on all the papers individually, but they do spread a remarkable spectrum of quality that is, unfortunately, inevitable in the proceedings of any meeting which attracts so wide and international a following. But one might expect even a gentle touch of the editor’s pen to spare us from such assertions that ‘we become in the most cases a very well curve but we can’t see the quantity of invented values’ This volume is one of a continuing series reporting the proceedings of the annual meetings of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine. No serious worker in medical ultrasound can afford to disregard it; equally, few, including libraries, can afford to buy it. Future proceedings should be made widely available, but they will require a firmer editorial hand than the present, particularly with regard to consistent quality and length, and possible selection, of papers for publication. S. Leeman

Atlas of gray scale ultrasonography Kenneth Churchill

J.W. Taylor Livingstone

(1978)

41 Ipp, f 19.50

This book is intended to be an introduction to those unfamiliar with ultrasound, and to serve as a text to medical postgraduates who need an understanding of ultrasound for their particular specialty practice. For these purposes it is an excellent publication. It begins with a very comprehensive list of contents which replaces an index. The inevitable chapter on physics is particularly well done. It gives a clear, concise and simple explanation of basic ultrasound physics without resort to the long mathematical equations that mathematicians and physicists understand. This chapter gives the clinician and ultrasonographer an accurate basis for an understanding of principles involved in the use of this modality. There is also a helpful chapter on the practical aspects of ultrasound scanning including a description of patient preparation and manoeuvres that can be used to cope with bowel gas or equivocal masses. Optimum machine settings can be difficult to obtain and usually have to be set on each patient and region under examination. The author gives some very practical advice on this matter using the liver as an example. There are particularly good sections on the liver, biliary system and pancreas with comments on the relation of ultrasound to other imaging modalities. There is again an emphasis on patient preparation for pancreas scanning. However, most centres will not be able to achive a 90% success rate for imaging this organ. The book does cover all areas of the abdomen and is complete in this respect. There is a detailed description of how to obtain a biparietal

43

diameter in obstetric examinations. chapter on the pelvis.

There is also a helpful

There are several errors in this publication which are worth mentioning because they cause confusion. In the chapter on the liver the superior mesenteric vein should be labelled the portal vein (p 25). A case of multiple abscesses has been labelled hydatid and included in the section on hydatid cysts. In the chapter on the great vessels the scanning line showing the superior mesenteric vein should be to the right of the scanning line showing the superior mesenteric artery (p 255). The author has also made some seemingly bold statements that are not substantiated by the images shown. For example he states that the IVC has been compressed by an enlarged pancreas, but the image is within normal limits. The difference in IVC lumen occurs because of the large input of blood from the renal veins which enter the IVC at this level (p 132). Also a mass in the left side of the abdomen could be a lymphoma mass involving lymph nodes and not necessarily be in the kidney (renal lymphoma) which may have been displaced by this mass (p 207). Bowel gas as well as barium can cause reverberations of the type shown and labelled as barium in bowel in the lower image on page 371. The title of the book is a little confusing. It is difficult to use the book as an atlas or a complete reference book. There is no index. These faults are really very minor and do not detract from the overall quality of the book. The reproduction of the images is particularly good. It is recommended that it be

included in the library of ultrasound departments as a very readable and understandable text for newcomers to the field of ultrasound. S.J. Pussell

Books listed below are those recently editorial

office

or those mentioned

from the publishers.

Their inclusion

them from being reviewed

received by the

in advance information here does not prevent

in a later issue.

Medical physics John R. Cameron

Wiley

and James G. Skofronick

(19781 xviii + 615 pp, f 15.50, $29.00

Acoustic surface waves Edited

by A. A. Oliner

Springer Verlag (1978)

xi + 331 pp. $48.00

Diagnostic ultrasound gynecology H. E. Thompson

Wiley

Medical

in clinical obstetrics and

and R. L. Bernstine

(1978)

xii + 192 pp. f17.65,

$34.50

~mnc@Pmnme Third international symposium on ultrasonics imaging and tissue characterization/first international symposium on ultrasonics materials characterization. Gaithersburg,

Maryland,

USA, 5-7/7-g

June 1978

Tissue charactetization

Much of the first day was devoted to the two sessions on Tissue Parameters, comprising 11 papers dealing mainly with the measurement of ultrasound velocity, attenuation and scattering in a number of tissues (particularly muscle, blood and bone) under a variety of conditions, and relating the measured values to known or induced changes in tissue structure or state. The most elegant experimental technique reported (Vinson and Eggleton) was undoubtedly the use of an acoustic microscope to demonstrate real-time velocity and attenuation changes at 100 MHz. The possibility of remote temperature monitoring during hyperthermia was the motivation for the technically difficult in vivo measurement of the temperature dependence of ultrasound velocity in various exposed organs and tissues in a number of animals (Nasoni, Sholes, Conner and Bowen). On a more basic level, O’Donnell, Jaynes and Miller demonstrated that the

44

powerful dispersion relation technique may be manipulated to provide an original and useful approach to establishing the consistency of experimental velocity and attenuation measurements in materials of interest. A concise session on Computerized Tomography showed the extent of continuing activity and progress in the attempt to construct image maps of ultrasound attenuation, velocity and impedance. Reconstruction images of human breasts were shown by Carson and his co-workers, and by Greenleaf and his collaborators, who also reported on advanced techniques for image analysis and error correction. A different approach to velocity reconstruction, by a firstorder approximation to the inverse solution of the wave equation, was presented by Mueller and Kaveh, and a mathematical method for reconstructing impedance maps from pulse-echo data was derived by Norton and Linzer. The application of these two techniques to human subjects may be awaited with some interest. Two papers, in all, made up the mini-session on Doppler

ULTRASONICS.

JANUARY

1979