Emergency Radiology The Requisites

Emergency Radiology: The Requisites , by Jorge Soto and Brian Lucey of Boston University School of Medicine, is one of 12 comprehensive books in the well-known Requisites series in radiology, which is popular among residents and fellows in training and attending radiologists looking to stay sharp in their field. The principal target audience appears to be residents in training, although the editors indicate that the book would also be of use as a reference for general radiologists in practice, emergency room physicians, and trauma surgeons. A welcome new addition to the Requisites series, this book diverges from the organ system–based and modality-based division of radiology, instead taking a multimodality, multisystem approach to teaching emergency radiology. Emergency radiology is a blossoming field and a newly developing subspecialty in major academic programs throughout the country. Soto and Lucey recognize the massive increase in the use of computed tomography and imaging in general, leading to the development of the subspecialty of emergency radiology. This book is a sincere attempt to collate all the radiologic information required to provide comprehensive coverage to an emergency room into one text practically useful for all comers.

The editors take on the daunting task of meshing all emergent conditions in radiology into 12 concise chapters covering traumatic and nontraumatic emergencies of the brain, head, and neck; chest trauma; abdominal trauma; extremity trauma; extremity nontrauma; imaging evaluation of common pediatric emergencies; traumatic and nontraumatic spine emergencies; nontraumatic emergency radiology of the thorax; abdominal nontrauma; pelvic emergencies; vascular emergencies; and emergency nuclear radiology. This is all done in a very readable 383 pages of text. The book can be read in several days or piecemeal by residents at the beginning of each subspecialty rotation. Multiple black-and-white boxes, figures, and tables fill each chapter, tailored to the most critical images and fundamental concepts in emergency radiology. Reader feedback from other texts in the Requisites series led to the efficient use of tables and boxes to summarize the essential information in emergency radiology practice and radiology today within the text.

I believe this text does a fine job of providing a lucid framework for practitioners with an interest in emergency imaging. The scope of the text is quite broad, and it does contain quite a bit of overlap with many of the other texts in the Requisites series, but it maintains the ability to confine the information to medical and surgical conditions that most commonly present to the typical emergency room setting instead of going overboard and trying to include all clinical scenarios and imaging possibilities that may present. It is nearly impossible to avoid overlap with other texts in the series, and each chapter contains the key diagnoses for the sake of completeness. You will not find rare or atypical emergent cases in this textbook, as it stays true to the essentials and fundamentals of emergency radiology and typical emergency room scenarios within each specific chapter.

The main division of the text is into two parts: acute trauma and acute nontrauma. Each chapter reflects this fundamental division and presents cases pertaining to each division. Soto and Lucey believe that this makes it easier to select chapters relevant to an individual radiology practice. For instance, large academic centers have trauma units with specific focus on those clinical scenarios, whereas community practices may run emergency rooms that do not deal with major trauma and shift focus to acute nontraumatic clinical entities.

The only major weakness of this text is its lack of color, which is a minor blemish on an otherwise fantastic work. The image quality in each chapter is adequate, but the lack of color plates makes the text less aesthetically pleasing in this age of robust picture archiving and communication systems with beautiful maximum-intensity projection, multiplanar reformatted, three-dimensional, and VR color images, which are becoming more and more useful for our clinical colleagues, who may base management and surgical approaches on what radiologists can now construct and provide within seconds. The casual reader enticed by the beautiful images in radiology may be taken aback by this omission. These special images are included in the text for the purpose of illustrating certain fracture patterns and emergent vascular conditions; however, the quality suffers slightly without the use of color. Perhaps in future editions and revisions, this will be updated with a supplemental key image guide. Aside from this one drawback, the text sticks to the most important conceptual, factual, and interpretive material required for clinical emergency department practice with pertinent multimodality black-and-white images.

Drs Soto and Lucey have done a fantastic job producing a contemporary text for emergency imaging that is small enough to be toted in book bags and displays nicely on complete radiology bookshelves. This book will serve radiologists both in training and in practice, emergency medicine specialists, and other physicians dealing with emergency cases regularly as a concise, useful introduction to emergency radiology. I found it to be a manageable text for short-term review and clear in scope. The finer details left out of the text are easily found in the remaining texts of the comprehensive Requisites series.

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Emergency Radiology The Requisites

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