Dr. Rajan Jain and Dr. Marco Essig, Professors of Radiology, took the pain of editing ‘Brain Tumor Imaging’ to be published by Thieme in 2015.

The title is ‘Brain Tumor Imaging’, while neurosurgeons facing axial and extra-axial tumors would appreciate ‘Intracranial Tumor Imaging’ – for ‘Central Nervous System Tumor Imaging’ the spinal tumors are missing.

Of the 36 authors, 30 are affiliated in the United States and six in Europe. It may be easier to recruit authors from your own continent and to squeeze out their texts before the third and absolutely last deadline. The book of 291 pages is printed in China on almost A4 size quality paper, in two columns with a readable font size, with a 7-page index.

There are 19 chapters, and the first one rightly states that MRI is the workhorse in neuro-oncology: morphology/perfusion/DWI/DTI/fMRI/MRS/etc. There are a lot of grey-white and color images of acceptable quality, though many color images are rather darkish to my taste (and would look better in a digital atlas than on paper).

For neurosurgeon members of neuro-oncology groups, particularly interesting chapters are: 2. Response Assessment in Neuro-oncology; 13. and 14. It’s Not Just the Tumor; and 16. Ultra-High-Field MRI. For R & D-oriented neurosurgeons, many chapters loaded with MRI technology texts might be of interest, including 18. Going Beyond Conventional MR Contrast Agents and 19. Molecular Imaging.

Most textbooks fail to cover their fields satisfactorily and to most tastes. Time-locked to the printing date, they cannot match the weekly lists of PubMed references that our librarian e-mails to us, using a panel of search words, such as glioblastoma*, meningioma* or radiosurgery*, and they cannot match a PubMed search when our next unusual patient raises the question of optimal and personalized therapy.

To whom should this book be recommended? – neurosurgeons orienting to neuro-oncology; radiologists orienting to neuroradiology; and neuroradiologists serving neuro-oncology groups.

However, as a member of a multidisciplinary neuro-oncology group since 2000, I would prefer a huge and browsable digital image atlas of the microcosmos of CNS tumors, arranged according to the latest WHO classification, with minimal text.