IMAGENEOLOGÍA NO-INVASIVA CARDIOVASCULAR CLÍNICA (NONINVASIVE CLINICAL CARDIOVASCULAR IMAGING)
Edited by David Bialostozky, Editorial Permanyer, Barcelona, Spain, 2009: 555 pages, 411 figures, 59 tables. ISBN: 978-84-9926-059-4.
The rapid development of imaging techniques for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, as well as the increasingly widespread demand for and use of these modalities, leads the cardiologist to consider the need to update his or her knowledge of this area. This concern is not exclusive to the professionals devoted specifically to the imaging field; rather, it affects the entire cardiology community. For this reason, there is a need for studies like the one we are reviewing here, with which it is possible to reach an accurate diagnosis based on imaging in the cardiology setting.
In this study, Dr Bialostozky heads a prominent group of authors, most of them from the sphere of the Instituto Nacional de Cardiología Ignacio Chávez, in Mexico City, who bring together and summarize the current evidence and join it to their own experience, achieving a text that deals with each and every aspect of the different cardiovascular diagnostic imaging techniques in a thorough and practical manner. This book helps physicians to familiarize themselves with these methods and to be in a position to utilize them or request them in the most suitable way so as to improve the management of their patients. The quality of the illustrations in the book is high and the diagrams are meticulously designed and are useful. The overall "aesthetic" quality of the work is very good. Moreover, it comes with a CD, which increases its usefulness.
As a less positive aspect, we could point out the slight disproportion in the amount of text corresponding to the different imaging techniques: of the 555 pages in the work, nearly 300 are devoted to nuclear medicine techniques and the rest to the remaining imaging techniques. However, despite this circumstance, the quality of the latter topics is still high; especially noteworthy are those chapters that require a great capacity of synthesis for their correct interpretation, such as that devoted to echocardiography in congenital heart disease.
In conclusion, this is an endevour that could serve as a reference book for updating, rapidly and completely, the reader's knowledge of the imaging techniques employed for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. Of special note is the clinical approach it provides.