Duker et al. present the second edition of their Handbook of Retinal OCT. It’s an upgrade from their last edition in many respects – there’s an enhanced digital version, the pages have a nice glossy sheen which makes it feel higher quality than their last book, but most importantly they’ve added in OCTA too.
The book is split into nine parts:
- Introduction to OCT
- Optic nerve disorders
- Macular disorders
- Vaso-occlusive disorders
- Inherited retinal degenerations
- Uveitis and inflammatory disorders
- Trauma• Tumors
- Peripheral retinal abnormalities
Each part is then split into different sections. The first part is the part you feel like you ought to read. You know, understand the different types of OCT and so forth. It’s a bit dry, but that’s probably just me, I’ve never been overly interested in how tech works! The section on artefacts is important to know about, and they break it down nicely into cause, identification and correction, with a couple of sentences for each bit.
Part 2: Optic nerve disorders is a bit of a misnomer. It doesn’t actually cover optic nerve disorders but gives an overview of basic optic nerve scan patterns and outputs.
For subsequent parts it goes through various pathologies and states a short introduction, clinical features, OCT features, if applicable OCTA features, ancillary testing and management. It’s nice and succinct and as you would expect, has plenty of images.
It’s actually pretty easy to read and whiz through. The digital version is available on inkling. I much prefer the spacing and size of text on the digital version and the ability to zoom in on the images is definitely handy.
I think most textbooks incorporate quite a lot of imaging pictures nowadays, so I wouldn’t say this is something you absolutely need to have on your bookshelf. However, it is a handy little edition for juniors who have knowledge about retinal conditions but aren’t really comfortable with OCT and OCTA. The focus on imaging means you do get a chance to look at plenty of those images and features and get significantly more comfortable with them.
