[book REVIEW]
Medical Imaging: Signals and Systems
by Jerry L. Prince and Jonathan M. Links,
Prentice Hall, 2006, ISBN: 0-13-0653535, 480 pages, hardbound. Reviewed by Z.
Jane Wang and Martin J. McKeown
(zjanew@ece.ubc.ca and mmckeown@
interchange.ubc.ca), University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
E
ngineers with biomedical
training will increasingly be
sought after as healthcare
resources are stretched due to
an aging population and
advances in biomedical technology.
According to the U.S. government’s new
long-range forecast (from the Whitaker
Foundation at http:// www.whitaker.
org/glance/outlook2012.html), “the
number of biomedical engineering jobs
will climb almost twice as fast as the
overall average for a 26.1% gain by
2012.” As a result of this growth, universities are increasingly offering biomedical engineering programs within
traditional electrical and computer engineering departments.
One of the core subjects generally
covered by biomedical engineering programs is medical imaging, as these
technologies have revolutionized medical diagnosis. The rapid evolution and
continual development of new technologies within the medical imaging
field has driven the need for up-to-date
textbooks on this subject. Several
recent publications have reached the
market to fill this need, and Medical
Imaging: Signals and Systems by Jerry
L. Prince and Jonathan M. Links is a
timely addition.
As this book has evolved from a
course on medical imaging systems
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2008.910431
taught at Johns Hopkins University over
the past 14 years, many distinctive features make it ideally suited as a textbook.
With signal processing as its foundation
and with a priori knowledge that readers
are familiar with signals and systems and
basic statistics, the book provides a relatively good balance between coverage
and depth. At the end of each chapter, a
“summary and key concepts” section
reviews the main ideas and lists important references. The text also provides
numerous examples (about 90) and
homework exercise problems (about
250). Adding to the appeal of this book
from an instructor’s viewpoint are the
rich online instructor resources, available from the book’s Web site supported
by Prentice Hall (http://vig.prenhall.
com:8081/catalog /academic/product/
0,1144,0130653535,00.html). For
instance, a 204-page solutions manual
and many art files are available for downloading, and an up-to-date list of errata is
maintained on the site. Potential instructors may also browse the related course
Web sites to find PowerPoint presentations developed by individual instructors
(e.g., Prof. Yao Wang from Polytechnic
University). These available resources are
probably the reasosns why a quick
Internet search during our review
revealed that many professors are currently using this book as the textbook for
their courses in medical imaging, despite
a relatively recent publication date.
Overall, the combination of four key
features of the book—a good balance of
content, a wealth of images and diagrams for presenting key concepts of
medical imaging, numerous motivational and biologically relevant examples, and rich online instructor
resources, including exercise problems—make the book a very attractive
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [152] JANUARY 2008
and useful textbook for an upper-level
undergraduate course or a graduatelevel course in biomedical imaging. As
indicated in the book’s preface, the
authors suggest that the intended readers should be familiar with signals and
systems, as well as elementary probability. Thus, the book generally approaches
the biomedical imaging topics from a
signal processing perspective. Hence,
the book is probably most appropriate
for engineering students.
In terms of aesthetics and functionality, the formatting, font, and figures are
well organized. The figures in the book
are generally quite illustrative and
attractive. Overall, the text is well
designed and the material is presented in
a coherent and integrated fashion with
desired readability.
The book is organized into five parts
and, in total, consists of 13 chapters
emphasizing key overall conceptual
divisions. Much of the background
material needed for the book is introduced in Part I (“Basic Imaging
Principles”), mainly including an introduction to medical imaging systems
(Chapter 1), a review of signals and systems (Chapter 2) (with emphasis on
two-dimensional signals), and an introduction to image quality (Chapter 3).
Focusing on signal processing and systems, Parts 2–5 cover the most important imaging modalities in radiology:
radiographic imaging (Part 2), nuclear
medicine (Part 3), ultrasound imaging
(Part 4), and magnetic resonance imaging (Part 5). Three chapters (Chapters
4–6) in Part 2 cover key modalities in
radiographic imaging, including the
basic physics underlying radiography,
such as the generation and detection of
ionizing radiation (Chapter 4); the
basics in projection radiography
1053-5888/08/$25.00©2008IEEE
systems, such as a fundamental idea of
projection imaging (Chapter 5); the
basics in X-ray computed tomography,
such as the concept of true tomograms
(images of cross sections of the body),
and CT image reconstruction and CT
image quality (Chapter 6). Three chapters in Part 3 (Chapters 7–9) present
the physics and modalities of nuclear
medicine imaging, with a focus on the
concept of radioactivity and
the major modalities, such as
planar scintigraphy and emission-computed tomography.
Two chapters (Chapters 10
and 11) in Part 4 form the
core material on ultrasound
imaging, including a brief
presentation of the physics of
sound in Chapter 10 and the
principles of ultrasound imaging systems in Chapter 11.
The last two chapters
(Chapters 12 and 13) in Part 5
discuss various techniques for magnetic
resonance imaging, the fastest growing
modality of medical images, in large
part due to the associated high image
quality and risk-free imaging factors.
A challenge with writing a textbook
on medical imaging is to present a
complete overview in a well-circumscribed manner but still reflect the
multidisciplinary aspects of the field.
In some ways, the book comes up short
with respect to the latter. To make the
book more attractive to a graduatelevel course and more suitable as a reference book to researchers in the
related areas, two aspects the reviewers
believe could have been better
addressed in this book are advanced
signal processing methods for biomedical imaging data analysis and state-ofthe-art biomedical applications. The
book covers only the physical principles of medical imaging, without discussing medical image analysis and
medical applications and systems, normally desirable for a graduate-level
course in this rapidly growing, inherently interdisciplinary field.
Graduate students using medical
images in their research typically need
an awareness of the challenges of image
analysis, the active research areas in
image analysis, recent advances in
image analysis methods, and how image
analysis techniques are tailored to medical images. Hence, sections on biomedical image analysis that include
standard techniques for segmentation,
registration, and visualization, as well
as advanced signal processing techniques, would have been welcome. A
AS THIS BOOK HAS EVOLVED
FROM A COURSE ON MEDICAL
IMAGING SYSTEMS TAUGHT AT
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
OVER THE PAST 14 YEARS,
MANY DISTINCTIVE FEATURES
MAKE IT IDEALLY SUITED
AS A TEXTBOOK.
brief review with a thorough list of references of related applications in diagnostics, therapeutics, and interventions
at the end of each part could be more
instructive to beginners in the field
(such as graduate students) and could
make students understand better the
multidisciplinary nature of biomedical
imaging research. With the scope of the
book as it is, instructors teaching a
graduate-level biomedical imaging
course may want to use supplementary
materials for additional depth or to
present current research topics. For
instance, we note that some instructors
create a custom course materials package using various chapters from other
textbooks, such as the Handbook of
Medical Imaging (SPIE Press, 2000).
Actually, the authors also suggest that
this book could be used in a two-semester course, with a two-semester
approach allowing instructors to use
supplementary materials.
The book by Prince and Links is likely to face competition from other books
published earlier as well as textbooks—
such as Fundamentals of Medical
Imaging by Paul Suetens (Cambridge
University Press, 2002), Introduction to
Biomedical Imaging by Andrew G. Webb
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), and
Introduction to the Principles of Medical
Imaging by C. Guy (World Scientific,
2005)—for use in medical imaging
courses. Among them, Suetens’s book is
popular in medical imaging courses, for
example, the course Bioengineering 508
(Physical Aspects of Medical Imaging) at
the University of Washington.
Due to the latter’s relative popularity,
we compare Prince and Links’
book and Suetens’ book. The
former was written principally
as a course text for teaching
medical imaging to undergraduate and postgraduate students
in engineering. The latter,
which is divided into three
parts to reveal the mathematical and physical principles of
medical imaging and image
processing, appears to be written—at least from the author’s
original intention—for a slightly different market. This market includes
radiology technologists involved in clinical imaging in hospitals since, as the
author states in an acknowledgment,the
book focuses on current clinical practice
in a modern hospital. Thus, unlike
Medical Imaging: Signals and Systems,
where coverage of each chapter includes
only sufficient physics and biology to
motivate the modality, Suetens’ book
includes more clinically relevant material. Different from the book by Prince and
Links, Suetens’ book also covers image
analysis, including a chapter on image
analysis proper and a chapter on imageguided interventions, which seem appropriate in the reviewers’ opinion.
However, the older book by Suetens necessarily lacks many current developments of medical imaging modalities
that are included in the book by Prince
and Links.
Overall, Medical Imaging: Signals
and Systems is a well-written text that is
deservedly in a strong position in the
growing market of medical imaging textbooks. The fact that signal processing is
the fundamental viewpoint of the book
will make it particularly attractive to
researchers and students in the signal
[SP]
processing community.
IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [153] SEPTEMBER 2007