Essential books for your first year as a resident physician in radiology

Welcome to radiology residency. Your most immediate existential crisis is to appear competent and productive on your first rotations. Your next existential crisis is to perform well on call starting end of your R1 year. Both of these require efficiently capturing the essential knowledge that attendings expect you to know.

Your most immediate existential crisis is to appear competent and productive on your first rotations.

While books seem old-fashioned in the era of generative AI, they can provide a more trusted resource with fewer black pearls than websites and chatbots. Start with real textbooks, not board review books. Board review books are more condensed, written by non-experts, and filled with black pearls.  Some textbooks are unreasonably boring and heavy, and they will end up as $500 paperweights, no matter how pretty the cover and how "prestigious" the author is. We've collected a list of book recommendations below that are trusted, practical, and affordable, and R1 year is a great time to start learning from them.

Body

Start your education on the abdomen and pelvis with body CT, and you'll develop the basic knowledge of anatomy and pathology that you need to later master body MRI. Fundamentals of Body CT is the most efficient way to learn this material. Skip the chest coverage in the book initially, and start with abdomen/pelvis. Head over to your favorite coffee shop or lake-front cabin for the weekend and take extensive hand-written notes while you read through this book. Highlighting and typed notes will not get this material into your cortex in the same way, and you'll need to know this stuff as a resident on call, and as a practicing radiologist.

Nuclear Medicine

One of the best radiology texts written, Essentials of Nuclear Medicine, is a must-have for every radiology resident. Definitive guidance on every study you will encounter in general nuclear medicine rotation. Trust this book over any other resource you have in reading nuclear medicine studies. The book also contains great coverage on the physics of nuclear imaging.

Neuroradiology

Your initial challenge in neuroradiology is to get a survey of all of the diseases you're expected to know. Start your neuroradiology study with a light skimming of  Neuroradiology: The Requisites. Don't actually read the body text - since you risk falling asleep. Instead, look at the images and read the captions. Try coupling your reading with the most interesting case you saw for the day on your neuro rotations.

Radiology Physics

At first blush, radiology physics can feel vast and complicated. Focus on (1) how to achieve good image quality, and (2) how to keep your patients safe. Because there are many informal resources to learn radiology physics, it's important to focus on a smaller trusted set that is free of black pearls.

Instead of searching the web randomly, go to The Essential Physics of Medical Imaging as your reference for specific questions. The book is too dense to read cover-to-cover. The strength of this book is in the x-ray based modalities, and to a lesser extent Ultrasound.

To learn the physics of nuclear medicine, refer back to the first chapter in your copy of Essentials of Nuclear Medicine. This chapter is very readable, and you should take immerse yourself in note taking and leisurely reading while your relatively free of board-exam panic right now.

To learn MRI, you'll need to approach from a variety of angles. Check out MRI in Practice as a first pass. The book is used by technologists, and the practical knowledge this book is a great place to start.  

To get a birds-eye view of the radiology physics you'll need to know for your radiology board exam, check out the physics section of Radiology Simplified (Apple Books). This review book is a rare exception where black pearls have been cleaned out, because it is the course text of Core Physics Review, so thousands of residents before you have reviewed the book on their way to passing radiology physics on their radiology board exam.

— Orbit Staff

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