This book deals with the key techniques and approaches that can be used to estimate the cost-effectiveness of health care interventions. It is a practical guide, using examples and encouraging the reader to apply the methods. A supporting website is available.

This is the second volume of Advances in Acoustic Microscopy. It continues the aim of presenting applications and developments of techniques that are related to high-resolution acoustic imaging. We are very grateful to the authors who have devoted considerable time to preparing these chapters, each of which describes a field of growing importance. Laboratories that have high-performance acoustic microscopes are frequently asked to examine samples for which the highest available resolution is not necessary, and the ability to penetrate opaque layers is more significant. Such applications can...

Acoustic microscopy enables you to image and measure the elastic properties of materials with the resolution of a good microscope. By using frequencies in microwave regime, it is possible to make the acoustic wavelength comparable with the wavelength of light, and hence to achieve a resolution comparable with an optical microscope. Solids can support both longitudinal and transverse acoustic waves. At surfaces a unique combination of the two known as Raleigh waves can propagate, and in many circumstances these dominate the contrast in acoustic microscopy. Following the invention of scanning...

This is the second volume of Advances in Acoustic Microscopy. It continues the aim of presenting applications and developments of techniques that are related to high-resolution acoustic imaging. We are very grateful to the authors who have devoted considerable time to preparing these chapters, each of which describes a field of growing importance. Laboratories that have high-performance acoustic microscopes are frequently asked to examine samples for which the highest available resolution is not necessary, and the ability to penetrate opaque layers is more significant. Such applications can...

In 1992 Acoustic Microscopy was published by Oxford University Press, in the series of Monographs on the Physics and Chemistry of Materials. Reviews appeared in the Journal of Microscopy 169 (1), 91] and in Contemporary Physics 33 (4), 296]. At the time of going to press, it seemed that the field of acoustic microscopy had settled down from the wonderful developments in resolution that had been seen in the late seventies and the early eighties and from the no less exciting developments in quantitative elastic measurements that had followed. One reviewer wrote, "The time is ripe for such a...

When young children first begin to ask 'why?' they embark on a journey with no final destination. The need to make sense of the world as a whole is an ultimate curiosity that lies at the root of all human religions. It has, in many cultures, shaped and motivated a more down to earth scientific interest in the physical world, which could therefore be described as penultimate curiosity.
These two manifestations of curiosity have a history of connection that goes back deep into the human past. Tracing that history all the way from cave painting to quantum physics, this book (a collaboration...