The Brain Atlas: A Visual Guide to the Human Central Nervous System, 3rd ed.

T.A. Woolsey, J. Hanaway, and M.A. Gado, eds. Wilmington, Del: Wiley-Liss; 2007, 254 pages, $59.59.

This soft-covered 254-page Atlas presents the gross and functional anatomy of the brain and spinal cord in an intuitive and visually pleasing manner. Correlative MR imaging sections are included, but this is not a major plus for this book because such labeled MR imaging anatomic sections abound in many books. Rather, it is the interesting way the authors take the reader through the brain and spinal cord, tying these structures together in a separate section called “Pathways.” In this last section lies the strength of the Atlas. Specifically, various pathways (eg, pain, taste, visual, vestibular pathways, etc) are laid out. Using a relatively simple pathway (corticospinal and corticobulbar) as an example, one sees on the right-hand page a section of the supratentorial brain with the cortex of origin down through 9 anatomic sections from the midbrain to pons to medulla and cord. Traced on these sections in color are levels where tracts bifurcate and innervate various cell bodies. As one looks at more complicated interconnections such as the afferent and efferent hippocampal pathways, it becomes a bit jumbled, but the authors do their best with color-coding to separate out the tracts. Ideally (and this would take significant extra work and ingenuity), future editions of this Atlas could include a CD that would allow the viewer to click on a structure in the hippocampus such as the subiculum and Ammon's horn and have the efferent fibers/tracts from that structure emerge and grow. With this, one could more readily appreciate the destination of the fibers in the fornix and where they terminate (including that elusive and often functional MR imaging–cited nucleus accumbens). Although tracing tracts and their destinations in many areas of the brain via a composite drawing is not simple, the authors do have to be complimented on giving us templates to sort out this overlapping anatomy.

For the serious student of basic neuroanatomy, this Atlas will be of interest.

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