Professor Okuda sets out the aim of this book which is to describe advances in various imaging modalities to facilitate the use of different techniques and contribute to the understanding of hepatobiliary diseases and pathophysiology. The book is edited by three Japanese professors of medicine and radiology, and one American professor of radiology who is a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) specialist. The contributing authors are Asian and American with the majority from Japan. The authors include physicians, gastroenterologists, pathologists, endoscopists, and radiologists.

This book celebrates the progress in imaging over the last two decades or so such that gross pathology is now fairly well shown by accurate and non-invasive or minimally invasive imaging methods. Microscopic histological changes are incompletely shown by imaging techniques but there has also been significant progress in characterising various processes, diseases, and tumours by imaging without biopsy.

The first section entitled “progress in imaging” considers computed tomography (CT), MRI, and developments in ultrasound. …