A review by Sharon Kay of Bonita Anderson’s textbook
If you perform echo, teach echo, learning echo, read echo or are about to embark on the echo journey here is the book for you.
I, like most cardiac sonographers, have waited with anticipation for Bonita Anderson to produce such a book. There are many echo textbooks out there. A lot are thick reference books with loads of physics and multiple measurements that can be performed. Unfortunately cardiac echo is not simple and it is a tool that can misdiagnose as quickly as it can diagnose. It can take a lot of skill to obtain the correct images and often takes a lot of parameters to come to a single result, nothing is ever based on one parameter alone and a lot of the time not all parameters are acquirable.
Bonita Anderson has a gift, the ability to explain this complex physiology, pathology and ultimately the physics of heart disease into a step by step simple guide to help us understand what we are seeing on the screen and why. In a case by case approach, A Sonographer’s Guide to the Assessment of Heart Disease goes through each cardiac pathology. For example, for endocarditis, it explains the pathogenesis, the clinical diagnosis and what the echo will show but also goes on to explain the likelihood of whether the “mobile mass” is a vegetation or not and why, the artifacts that could be involved and the alternatives for what the “mobile mass” could be. A very comprehensive approach.
There are well presented tables for each pathology and fabulous pathology specimen images in colour from Dr William D Edwards from Mayo Clinic Rochester. The images are a treat to view.
If I am looking for problems with this book I would say an electronic version would be useful. I’d also like to see a little more of 3D echo.
This “textbook”, though I believe it will become more of a reference book used repetitively, breaks down each cardiac pathology into a sum of its parts explaining why we see what we do on the screen, and at the end of the day that is what echocardiography is all about.
Bonita Andersons first book “Echocardiography: The Normal Examination and Echocardiographic Measurements” and her subsequent revised edition in 2007 are the most dog-eared echo books around, read and reread by many a sonographer, cardiac registrar and cardiologist alike. I don’t believe I have visited an echo lab across Australia, Asia or Northern America where there was not a copy. I believe this book will follow suite and would recommend it to sonography students, experienced sonographers, registrars, critical care physicians and cardiologists.
