Fossum: There’s an App for That
Look alive veterinary students, interns, surgery residents, and seasoned veterinarians in need of quick point-of-care fracture management advice.
Scientific publishing house Elsevier is offering the free Small Animal Fracture Management app designed as a companion app to the fourth edition of the ubiquitous Fossum’s Small Animal Surgery.
The result is pretty elegant: the user starts by picking a broken bone and then chooses the type of fracture (simple, compound, etc.). The app provides recommends for optimal fracture therapy (cerclage wire, plates, pins, etc.) by showing the user a picture of the repaired fracture.
The app also offers a table of recommended implants for each individual fracture based on its Fracture Assessment Score (FAS), which is an assessment of the fracture’s healing potential based on mechanical, biological, and clinical factors involved.
It doesn’t include descriptions of the actual surgeries. For that, the app contains a reference to the relevant pages in the textbook (fourth edition, published in 2013) where fracture management is discussed at length.
The app is available free for iOS devices.
About the Author
Dr. Marit Veeber is a small animal clinician from Estonia. Her special interests include emergency and internal medicine. In her spare time she likes to read, hike, take pictures of stuff and play around with mobile apps. She also tweets about veterinary medicine and manages social media for the European Veterinary Emergency and Critical Care Society.
