Netter’s Concise Radiologic Anatomy: With STUDENT CONSULT Online Access, 2e

Book Preface

Diagnostic medical images are now an integral component of contemporary courses in medical gross anatomy. This primarily reflects the steadily increasing teaching of clinical correlations within such courses. Accordingly, radiographic images are included in all gross anatomy atlases and textbooks. These images are typically plain radiographs, axial CT/MRI (computed tomography/magnetic resonance image) scans, and angiograms of various parts of the vascular system.

Although such images reflect the capabilities of diagnostic imaging technology of perhaps 25 years ago, they do not reflect the full integration of computer graphics capabilities into radiology. This integration has resulted in a tremendous expansion in the ability of radiology to represent human anatomy. The active process of reformatting imaging data into optimal planes and types of image reconstruction that best illustrate anatomic/pathologic features is not limited to academic centers. To the contrary, the graphics workstation is now a commonly used tool in the practice of diagnostic radiology. Special views and image reconstructions are currently part of the diagnostic process and are usually made available to all those participating in patient care, along with an interpretation by the radiologist that describes the pathology and relevant anatomy.

This situation led us to the realization that any student of anatomy would benefit from early exposure to the manner of appearance of key anatomic structures in diagnostic images, especially advanced CTs and MRIs. Thus, in 2007 we (a radiologist and two anatomists) chose to develop an atlas that illustrates how modern radiology portrays human anatomy. To accomplish this task, we decided to match modern diagnostic images with a subset of the anatomic drawings from the Atlas of Human Anatomy by Dr. Frank H. Netter. Netter’s atlas has become the gold standard of human anatomy atlases. Its images are quite familiar to the vast majority of students who complete a course in human gross anatomy. By providing a bridge between the manner in which anatomic features appear in Netter’s atlas to their appearance in radiographic images, this book enables the acquisition of comfortable familiarity with how human anatomy is typically viewed in clinical practice. In this second edition of our atlas we welcome to our author team Dr. Kenneth S. Lee from the Department of Radiology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Dr. Lee’s area of specialty is diagnostic and therapeutic musculoskeletal ultrasound. We invited Dr. Lee to become an author of Netter’s Concise Radiologic Anatomy because we have included in this edition approximately 10 new radiologic illustrations that match Netter plates with ultrasound images. We were reluctant to include ultrasound images in the first edition of this book because ultrasound, relative to radiographs, CT, and MRI, does not often provide a visual perspective on anatomy that is comparable to the Netter drawings. However, ultrasound anatomy is being incorporated into an increasing number of medical gross anatomy courses, and the utilization of ultrasound is now inherently part of many medical specialties. Therefore, with the help of Dr. Lee, we found examples of ultrasound images that could be matched with Netter drawings.

In addition to the incorporation of the ultrasound images, in this second edition we have improved the CT/MR matches for other plates, added a few new matches, and made corrections to errors we found in the first edition for which we apologize to any reader who was confused by our mistakes. We have also deleted a few illustrations that we felt did not portray as good a match as we initially thought and hopefully improved some of the clinical and anatomic notes we include with each plate.

In selecting and creating images for this atlas, we frequently had to choose between diagnostic images that are in very common use (axial, coronal, and sagittal slices) and images that result from more advanced reconstruction techniques, that is, images that are not commonly found in clinical practice but that more clearly depict anatomic structures and relationships. When a “routine” image was found that matched the Netter Atlas well and illustrated key anatomic points, it was selected. However, we decided to include many advanced image reconstructions, such as maximum intensity projection and volume rendered (“3-D”) displays.

We understand that learning to interpret radiographic images requires reference to normal anatomy. Accordingly, we believe our atlas will facilitate this process by closing a common mental gap between how an anatomic feature looks in an anatomic atlas versus its appearance in clinical imaging.

Edward C. Weber, Joel A. Vilensky,
Stephen W. Carmichael, Kenneth S. Lee