Augmented reality (AR) offers tremendous benefits to the field of medicine, particularly in the area of medical imaging.  Augmented reality technology gives medical professionals the ability to gain additional insight into a patient’s body through superimposed images over the patient’s actual body. This advantage helps medical professionals to locate the exact problem a patient is experiencing, as well as its point of origin.  Augmented reality can be used as an advanced medical imaging diagnostic tool, and its capabilities are second to none.  With augmented reality, medical professionals have access to tangible visualizations of what is going on inside a patient’s body, which can help to expedite the diagnostic process in critical cases, improve the accuracy of the diagnosis, and save lives.  

Images of hidden objects can be very effective for medical diagnosis or surgery and can be viewed in a more detailed way with augmented reality.  Examples of these include virtual X-rays based on real time images from ultrasound. Advances in medical AR have even provided physicians with the ability to access a patient’s medical history instantaneously with the use of augmented reality technology.  With the use of a medical AR application, virtual tags containing information about a patient’s previous injuries or illnesses can be made visible via superimposed images.

With advances in medical AR and the use of augmented reality for medical imaging, procedures that once might have been potentially life threatening can now become minimally invasive procedures. Medical professionals now have the ability to use augmented reality to view a patient’s skeletal structure and internal organs through images superimposed over the body's exterior.  Augmented reality in medical imaging enables physicians to diagnose an illness with pinpoint accuracy. With medical AR, other high-risk procedures, such as a spinal injection, can be performed with greater accuracy and less risk when a medical professional is able to actually see an image of the patient’s spine superimposed over the exterior of the body.   

The future of medical imaging lies in augmented reality.  Medical AR has the potential to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare in ways that were previously unimaginable. A level of medical imaging technology that was once only feasible in the context of science fiction can now become a reality with medical AR.