Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: May 4, 2018
Date Accepted: Mar 4, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Review of Augmented Reality in Medicine
ABSTRACT
Background:
Augmented Reality (AR) is a technology that integrates digital information with the user's real-world environment. It offers a new approach for treatments and education in medicine. AR aids in surgery planning, patient treatment and helps explaining complex medical situations to patients and their relatives.
Objective:
This systematic and bibliographic Review offers an overview of the development of Applications in AR with a medical use case within the time range from 03/2012 to 06/2017. This work can aid as a guide to literature and is categorizing the publications in the field of AR research.
Methods:
In total 1309 publications from PubMed and Scopus between 03/2012 and 06/2017 have been manually analyzed and categorized based upon a pre-defined taxonomy. 340 duplicates were removed and of the remaining 969 publications, 631 publications have been excluded, i.e. due to wrong classification or unavailable technical data. The remaining 338 publications were original research on AR. An assessment of the maturity of projects has been conducted to the remaining publications using Technology Readiness Levels (TRL). To provide a comprehensive process of inclusion and exclusion, the authors adopted the PRISMA statement.
Results:
The results show an increasing trend in publications on AR used in medicine. There is no relevant number of clinical trials on the effect of AR in medicine. Domains that make use of display technologies seem to be more researched than other medical fields. The TRL show that AR technology is following a rough bell curve around the levels 4 to 7. Current AR technology is more often applied in treatment scenarios than in training. The appendix contains an interactive table to search and filter through the reviewed publications.
Conclusions:
This work discusses the applicability and future development of augmented and mixed reality technologies such as wearable computers and AR devices. It offers an overview of current technology and a base for researchers interested in developing AR applications in medicine. The field of AR is well researched, and there is a positive trend, but it is in an early stage in medicine and not widely adopted in clinical practice. It still lacks clinical studies proving the effectiveness of applied AR technologies.
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