SkeleTour

Orthopaedic classifications, drawn on the bone.

SkeleTour is a free study tool from AceMedEd for medical students preparing for orthopaedic audition rotations. Instead of memorising tables in isolation, you find each classification on the skeleton and watch its types drawn on the bone.

How to use it

1. Tap a bone to zoom in, then tap a region (the femoral neck, the distal radius…) to open its classification cards. Once zoomed in, drag to move around the skeleton, pinch (or ctrl + scroll) to zoom, and use the area button at top left to step back one level.
2. Each card gives the rationale, the classification table and a treatment overview. Hover or tap a row to draw that type on the bone, drag the slider to morph between types, or press ▶ to play through them.
3. See all types side by side lays every type out at once for comparison.
4. Search by name (Garden, Pipkin, Schatzker) or by region.
5. Quiz me has four modes: name the drawn type, find the drawing, pick the management, or Read the film on a real radiograph, where you present it out loud first and then compare with a model read. Every answer is scheduled for spaced review; the number on the button is what is due today.
6. Progress colours the skeleton by how well you know each region (blue: started, orange: warming up, green: mastered). It is saved on this device only.
7. Each region shows Views & how to read (what to order, the lines and normal values) and the nerves and vessels at risk, which you can draw on the bone.
8. Mimics pins the normal variants and apophyses that get called fractures, with how to tell them apart.
9. Tumors turns the distal femur into a lesion map: choose under or over 30, then tap a lesion to see where it typically sits and how it looks on a radiograph.
10. The importance chips (Must Know, Rotation, Awareness) filter the cards. AO/OTA and More systems add further classifications, including pediatric ones; they are off by default.

Image credits

Every bone is a cleaned, recoloured scan of a public-domain anatomical engraving. Some plates are mirrored, cropped or combined to fit the Vitruvian pose; the X-ray view is derived from the same plates.

• Henry Gray, Anatomy of the Human Body, 20th US edition (Lea & Febiger, 1918). Figs. 112, 190, 200, 202, 207, 213, 219, 220, 241, 244, 247, 258, 268, 290, 291. Via Wikimedia Commons.
• Johannes Sobotta, Atlas and Text-book of Human Anatomy, vol. 1, English edition by J. Playfair McMurrich (W. B. Saunders, 1909). Figs. 21 (vertebral column), 122 (radius), 138 (femur, medial), 142 (patella), 146 and 149 (tibia and fibula, lateral). Via Wikimedia Commons and the Internet Archive.
• Werner Spalteholz, Hand-Atlas of Human Anatomy, vol. 1, translated by Lewellys F. Barker (1906). Figs. 124 (ulna) and 234 (elbow joint), combined with Sobotta Fig. 122 for the lateral elbow. Via the Internet Archive.

Real imaging: every radiograph, CT and MRI is openly licensed (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA) and comes from Wikimedia Commons contributors (among them Hellerhoff, James Heilman and Mikael Häggström) and open-access journal articles on PubMed Central. Each image names its author, licence and source under it in the viewer. Images are shown unmodified except where the credit says "cropped"; share-alike images and their crops remain under their original CC BY-SA licence.

The coronal section of the calcaneus (for Sanders) is a SkeleTour schematic, since no atlas shows that plane.

3D models (pelvis): openly licensed models, credited from the model manifest.

All three atlases are in the public domain. The Vitruvian layout follows Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1490).

About the content

The classification tables, rationales and treatment overviews were written for AceMedEd and checked against standard orthopaedic references, including Orthobullets (used for fact-checking only; no text or images are reproduced from it). The fracture drawings are simplified teaching diagrams, not tracings of real radiographs. Tumor mode follows the approach of González-Huete et al., "Radiographic Evaluation of Bone Tumors", RadioGraphics 2023 (age, location, internal characteristics, periosteal reaction); its lesion drawings are schematic and placed at each lesion's typical site.

Disclaimer

SkeleTour is for education only. It is not medical advice and is not a substitute for clinical judgement, current guidelines or the original classification papers. Treatment summaries are simplified overviews; real management depends on the patient. Do not use it to make decisions about a patient’s care.

Free for medical studentsAceMedEd