Afewprogramming

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languagesarealso presented as CP/M
applications software. Chapter 5 begins with Basic and proceeds
through other languages to an introduction to asubset of C (BDSC
compiler). That may be too ambitious an objective: To explain C to
an article on the feasibility of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance imaging
is of historical interest. Some of the topics, such as a chapter on 3-D
imaging of the heart, are still research topics of interest, and would
be of value to a beginning graduate student.

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anovice requires more than the few pages allotted. Functions The concluding five chapters are grouped under the heading of
necessary for program development (e.g., editing, compiling, Tutorials. Three of the chapters, one on ultrasound, one on Nuclear
linking, etc.) are vividly described and are always illustrated with Medicine Imaging, and one on CT algorithms, are good basic

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examples. reviews of the state-of-the-art at the time, but could easily be used
The sixth and final chapter sketches the support structure for the as teaching chapters in an engineering classroom today.
operating system after presenting the Intel 8080 assembler as a This text, in summary, contains some material of value to en-
designing tool that enables the user to take full advantage of the gineers and engineering students. It suffers somewhat in that it
underlying architecture. The structural analysis of the CP/M pre- contains a large amount of clinical material (physicians could say
sented i n this chapter is the mostaccurate I haveeverseen in a the same about the mathematics involved) and is dated in a
general text: the book presents examples of various system modifi- number of areas.
cations, explains debugging techniques, and discusses the use of Imaging for Medicine, Volume 1, Nuclear Medicine, Ultrasonics,
new, customized drivers. and Thermographycontains thirteen chapters devoted to the topics
CP/M and the Personal Computer is recommended for people implied in its title. The text is a compendium of articles written by
who want an interesting tool for understanding CP/M. Dwyer and various expert authors in their respective fields. The articles were
Critchfield'sbookcould serve as an excellent lab book for an collected over a period of four years, the 1980 publication date,

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undergraduate course. It includes an updated bibliography, but therefore, implies that some of the material is eight years old, and

systems.
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some general references on operating systems should be added to
if for a better picture of CP/M in the grand scheme of operating

Reprinted from / € E € Computer, vol. 16, no. 2, p. 156,Feb. 1985

thus is out of date, a fact that is borne out while reading the text.
The text i s aimed at the beginning scientist/engineer interested
in the area of radiology. It contains excellent review chapters on an
introduction to the field (Chapter I), Gammacamera technology
(Chapter 4), tomography (Chapter 5), X-ray fluorescence imaging

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(Chapter 7), and ultrasonic imaging (Chapter 10). Chapter 8 covers
coded aperture imaging in 94 pages; it isan excellent overview,
with well-presented mathematics. Chapter 9, on diagnostic uses of
ultrasonic imaging, i s another extremely well-written chapter,
Medical Imaging Systems-A. Macovski. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: covering the history and uses of the field, with an excellent collec-
+
Prentice-Hall, 1983, xiv 256 pp., ISBN: 0-13-572685-9, $29.95.) tion of scans to augment the text. Other chapters in the text are
well written, but suffer in being somewhat outdated. Almost all
Imaging for Medicine, Volume 1, Nuclear Medicine, Ultrasonics,
and Thermography-S. Nudelman and D. Patton, Eds. (New York: chapters inthis text arevery well referenced, thus the chapters
+
Plenum, 1980, xiv 493 pp., ISBN: 0-306-40384-6, $49.50.) could serve one well in defining the state-of-the-art at the time.
While this text hassome variation i n style due to the multiple
Medical imaging Techniques, A Comparison-K. Preston, K. Taylor,
S. Johnson, and W.Ayers, Eds. (New York: Plenum, 1979, xxiii 372 + authors, and is somewhat dated, the entire text would be of value
in an undergraduate review course in the engineering aspects of
pp., ISBN: 0-306-40161-4, $45.00.)
Reviewed by Paul H. King, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, imaging. O n the graduate level, perhaps half the text is of direct
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. value in a Medical Instrumentation course.
Medical Imaging Systems contains eleven chapters on the history,
In reading these three texts for this review, it was vividly demon- theory, and instrumentationinvolved in most radiology imaging
strated to this writer how dramatically the field of medical imaging systems. The text was developed over a period of several years from
has developed over the period of time covered by these texts. The class notes fora graduatecourse (no namegiven) i n Electrical
text Medical Imaging Techniques is based largely on the proceed- Engineering at Stanford.
ings of a conference held in 1976. The articles in lmaging for Starting with a very short introductory chapter (seven pages) the
Medicine were collected largely from 1976-1980, and the material author immediately considers the mathematics involved in linear
in Medical Imaging Systems has references up to 1931. This review systems involving three dimensions. With this covered, the author
will cover each text in turn, and then will compare the three texts covers the physics of projection radiography, source considerations
as to their potential use. (point, plane, and so forth), recorder considerations (physics and
Medical Imaging Techniques, A Comparison wasan outgrowth mathematics), and noise considerations. Each of thesechapters is
of 1976 Engineering Foundation Conference on Non-Invasive Medi- well written and illustrated. In addition, each of the chapters has
cal Diagnosis, whereby the editors felt it of value to attempt to several problems at the end and these serve to illustrate and extend
publishatextthatwould be useful to both physicians and en- the text of the chapter.
gineers in introducing them tothe field of medical imaging. Several With the basic mathematics covered i n the previous chapters, the
attendees at the conference, and others, have therefore col- author covers tomography (Chapter 7), Nuclear Medicine (Chapter
laborated in this 25 chapter survey of the field. The text is quite 8), Ultrasound Imaging (Chapters 9, IO), and Selected Topics
nicely broken into four subdivisions: System Considerations, Clini- (Chapter 11). In each case, the additional mathematics necessary to
cal Results,ResearchTopics, and Tutorials. These titles serve as a properly describe the imaging modalities are well presented and
useful means of demarking the content of the text. extended with end of chapter problems. The chapter on selected
TheSystems Considerations section (5 chapters) contains some topics very briefly covers nuclear magnetic resonance, digital sub-
interesting material on the planning issues involved in early CT tractionradiology, energy selective imaging, stimulated positron
scanning systems, a discussion of technology assessment and di- emission, and special ultrasound techniques.
agnostic test evaluation, and a brief editorial on health care de- This is an excellent text for a graduate course in instrumentation,
livery. These chapters are of interest as historical matter, as they or for a novice engineer interested in working in instrumentation
relate to early problems with new (1978 and prior) technology. They development or image improvement in radiology. The text is neces-
are, however, outdated. sarily heavy on mathematics, and has excellent problems. The text
The next sevenchapters contain articles relating to clinical re- could use some expansion, for example, the historical notes on
sults. The topics include cross comparisons of radionuclide scan- each modality are overly short, and some additional clinical images
ning, and computed tomography (CT) techniques in the detection could be added inorder to make the text more comprehensive and
of problems i n various body systems. Several chapters are very well comprehensible.
documentedwithclinical scans, and as such are good teaching Medical lmagingSystems will be the required text for my graduate
chapters. Two chapters, one on liver scanning, and one on diagno- course in instrumentation next spring, and is recommended at that
sis of aortic and lymph node lesions,are quitegoodclinical level. In addition, Imaging for Medicine will serve as a reference
reviews. These chapters would form a good reading assignment for text. Both Imaging for Medicine and Medical Imaging Techniques
undergraduate students in engineering, so that they could appreci- are recommended as supplemental reading texts for undergraduate
ate the art of image interpretation. courses i n Medical Instrumentation.
Eight chapters under the general heading of ResearchTopics
follow. Topics including the use of CT in diagnosis of pulmonary Reprinted from / E € Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazfne,
nodules are of teaching value for students interested in radiology; vol. 4, no. 1, M a r . 1985.

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