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I purchased this book to help me in planning an upgrade of our radiography system from film/screen to digital. The authors compiled this work at least partly from the information provided at animalinsides.com. It provides an excellent range of information from imaging physics and processing to evaluation of commercial digital radiography products and vendors. I found the book enlightening. I appreciated the relatively unprejudiced discussions of the different systems (CR vs two flavors of DR) unlike vendor-supplied materials.
I did find some problems with the book that may reduce its value or ease of use. For instance, there is no index. Also, some chapters are simply verbatim copies of... More > webpage articles. Besides a lack of editing for clarity, an occasion broken “link” is left in (e.g. “found here” in a discussion of JPEG2000, where here was originally a link to a Wikipedia definition). No amount of clicking would bring me to the definition. So, this book could use some serious editing. There are many typographical errors. The spreadsheet in chapter eleven is goofed-up. Much of the text is written in the fashion of an oral conversation. Besides the fact that verbal turns of phrase may not make clear sense as written text, there is also a lack of punctation which leads to a confusing smear of phrases without pause. Also,the spoken style has redundancies which don’t make sense when written. In chapter 6, the discussion of system repeatability is confusing and not as clear as it should be. The best edited chapter is the third. Why? I presume because it was published in a journal and subjected to some variety of editing.
The discussion of image processing was an education for me. Unfortunately, the typos were a plague throughout. The text explaining the histogram about dynamic range in figure 10 of chapter two apparently reversed the labeling of the axes.
The discussion of monitor selection used the unit MP to describe a monitor’s resolution. When looking online at various monitors, I found that their resolution was described in X pixels by Y pixels. It would be a kindness to clue the reader in to the relationship between these ways of looking at monitors (e.g. 1600 pixels by 1200 pixels= 1,920,000 pixels or about 2 MP). MP may be used by medical monitor vendors, but as the authors point out, non-medical monitors may be perfectly adequate and their resolution is not generally described in MP (which is more of a camera term).
Overall, I was very pleased with the book. It’s timely and covered a wide range of important issues useful for any veterinarian looking to buy a digital radiography system. < Less