Clinical Orthopedics

Surgical illustration for Scott Bodell is where good storytelling meets clinical medicine. Scott started his career at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas as both a surgical illustrator and an Assistant Professor in the UTSW Graduate Program of Biomedical Communications. He’s a trusted collaborator with medical professionals around the U.S. More recently, Scott was engaged by Brad Henley, MD, MBA, of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle and Michael J. Gardner, MD, of Stanford University Medical Center to illustrate the first Harborview Tips and Tricks in Fracture Surgery, Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 2011. This and the two subsequent titles have been well received. The first of the Harborview titles was reprinted and distributed in China. For each of these titles, Bodel Medical Media was the primary contributing illustrator and designed and exectuted the cover art, as seen below.

3D models are valuable assets when illustrating or animating multistep surgical stories, especially stories involving fracture displacement and reduction. The shoulder model below was developed to illustrate fragment displacement and step-by-step reduction using an external distractor. Each of the four fragments has controls to move that fragment consistent with the muscle forces pulling on it.

The femur model was designed to recreate angles of deformity from injury, to visually demonstrate degrees of adjustment needed to reduce fractures and restore anatomic angles that will mirror the patient’s uninjured side. Each bone segment in the model can be moved in planes of rotation manually or by numeric entry.