Abstract
This atlas is authored by several well-known Japanese researchers from government, academic, and industrial laboratories. Researchers in the fields of carcinogenesis and toxicology are the intended audience. The purpose of this work is to further interest in exploring pathology and oncology. The title does not specify so, but the neoplasms presented are from rats, mice, and hamsters. The atlas is organized into 10 chapters that include the musculoskeletal system and soft tissue (Chapter 1); the heart, hematopoietic system, and thymus (Chapter 2); the digestive system (Chapter 3); the respiratory system (Chapter 4); the urinary system (Chapter 5); the male reproductive system (Chapter 6); the female reproductive system (Chapter 7); the endocrine system (Chapter 8); the nervous system (Chapter 9); and the skin, the appendages, and melanoma (Chapter 10). Each chapter is introduced by a very brief summary relevant to chemically induced tumors in the system. A rather short list of references, usually five or six for each chapter, is given at the end of the atlas. Approximately 650 color and black and white, gross, light, and transmission electron microscopic photographs and photomicrographs are included.
Navigation forward and backward through the atlas is very easy. However, because one cannot go from one subject area in a chapter to another in a different chapter without first going back to the table of contents and then clicking through the images in the various area of interest, the process is somewhat time consuming and cumbersome. Unfortunately, the atlas is not paginated and no index is included to help the reader find a particular image. Although the photographs and photomicrographs are generally of good quality, because the images are electronic reproductions of the original photographs, they are not as crisp as can be obtained by capturing images directly from the tissue section. In addition, the images would have been more instructive had the authors made more liberal use of arrows and other markers to point out specific features of the lesions. The references, although adequate, are not extensive. As would be expected, since this work is a translated electronic copy of the original version published in 1987, the most recent references are from 1987. As a result, some information is not current. For example, hepatocellular adenoma in the rat liver is referred to by the old term of “neoplastic nodule.”
This atlas would be useful to the pathologist as an added source of images of chemically induced neoplasms to complement more current and exhaustive references such as Pathology of Tumours in Laboratory Animals, Vol. I—Tumours of the Rat and Vol. II—Tumours of the Mouse (V. S. Turusov and U. Mohr, Vol. I—1990, Vol. II—1994, IARC, Lyon, France).