L.S. Medina, K. E. Applegate, C.C. Blackmore (eds): Evidence-based imaging in pediatrics: optimizing imaging in pediatric patient care

Excerpt

There is an evolution in publishing, and I am not referring to iPads and ebooks, per se. No, for the last decade, with improved access to digital images and improved access to and organization of primary research, the terms “expert” and “resource” have evolved. That is not to say that some of our senior colleagues are not experts. But now anyone can have instant access to “the latest” information about a disease using sites such as the National Library of Medicine and even scholar.google.com. Authors originally armed with a digital camera and now with images taken directly from PAC systems are able to create atlases and teaching files with quotes taken directly from the latest review article, even linking them directly to other atlases and original articles. Books that had taken decades to assemble can be self-published on the internet in a matter of weeks. Yet most of this new medical literature is un- or under-annotated and rarely includes references, and when editing is applied it usually changes the images and not the text. Amazon’s radiology best sellers are dominated by the new atlases of Amyris, Thieme and Elsevier. But these shiny new texts train the eye more than the brain. They lead to an intellectual dead end where pattern recognition bumps into a mystery that is the unexplained physiology or science of medical imaging and is sometimes further confused by bare text lacking the intellectual anchor of a period. …