Book Review

  • D Carter
Interpretation of Breast Biopsies, 4th Edition, 417 pp, Philadelphia, Lippincott, Wilkins & Williams, 2002 ($149.00).

At 417 pages, the 4th edition of Darryl Carter’s Interpretation of Breast Biopsies is more than double the size of the original edition, but the text is still handbook-sized and easy to digest. This edition also comes with a CD that contains more than 600 additional color pictures to supplement the textbook, which still has primarily black and white images.

The strength of this book over many of the other standard breast pathology books available today is that it incorporates the clinical correlation with pathologic interpretation. For example, there are chapters on risk factors in breast cancer (Chapter 2), biopsy and local treatment (Chapter 3), and prognosis and systemic therapy (Chapter 9). Even within the other chapters, there are nice discussions about clinically significant findings.

The CD is indeed helpful, in that lesions are illustrated more fully and in color. The illustrations on the CD are tied into the text by references to “efigures.” There is also a “quiz” section, which presents unknowns and can be used for resident education or self-assessment. The pictures are somewhat variable in quality: some appear to have been scanned from old kodachromes, whereas others appear to be freshly taken, crisp images. The CD does not include text, except for legends. It appears somewhat flat, without much interactive capability. For example, pictures are presented at one size, without the ability to magnify areas that you wish to look at more closely. Nor can you call up the accompanying text to read more about the lesion or skip to other chapters that may discuss other aspects of a particular lesion. So for someone who has used e-texts, this certainly does not compare favorably.