Advanced Medical Displays: A Literature Review of Augmented Reality

The impressive development of medical imaging technology during the last decades provided physicians with an increasing amount of patient specific anatomical and functional data. In addition, the increasing use of non-ionizing real-time imaging, in particular ultrasound and optical imaging, during surgical procedures created the need for design and development of new visualization and display technology allowing physicians to take full advantage of rich sources of heterogeneous preoperative and intraoperative data. During 90´s, medical augmented reality was proposed as a paradigm bringing new visualization and interaction solutions into perspective. This paper not only reviews the related literature but also establishes the relationship between subsets of this body of work in medical augmented reality. It finally discusses the remaining challenges for this young and active multidisciplinary research community.