How AR and MR Technology Can Reduce Vulnerability in Medical Treatment
Hospitals and health care organizations work hard to provide patient-centered care every day. In reality, patient experience is something that is now being evaluated, tracked, and debated around the spectrum of healthcare. But periods of anxiety and medical distress are still common for most patients and this critical aspect is rarely discussed in the discussion. For example, patients awaiting an X-ray, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) scan may be terrified by the results. Maybe the picture may show that they have a life-threatening illness, or they need complicated and costly surgery. It is in times like these that patients are at their most vulnerable during uncertainty. One way of minimizing medical uncertainty is by using tandem imagery with Augmented Reality (AR) or mixed reality (MR) technologies to shorten anxiety-causing waiting times and procedures.
Practical Impacts of AR and MR:
To understand the potential effect of AR and MR on medical vulnerability, identifying those technologies first is important. AR and MR are not the same as virtual reality (VR), despite similar-sounding names and acronyms. The VR technologies plunge users into an entirely artificial world. Users also donate a VR headset that blocks out the real world and then provides them with a visual and auditory experience that makes them feel like they’re in the VR software-generated environment. The fact that AR and MR technologies can layer digital capabilities over a patient’s actual in real-time, the clinical environment opens up new avenues to enhance the experience.
These solutions allow providers to imagine what they can’t see in 2D, or even with 3D print models. AR and MR provide capabilities for 4D visualization. One use helps doctors to monitor the DICOM images of a patient, for example, their CT or MRI scans — directly on their body during surgical preparation to help assess optimal surgical navigation. By reducing the need for exploratory navigation and speeding up the time it takes for patients to undergo operations, this will improve surgical results. AR and MR innovations may help reduce medical uncertainty by having doctors more reliable information faster, thereby reducing patients’ time spent waiting, worrying, and in care. Some use-cases may include:
Heart Surgery:
Visualizing the interior of a beating heart can be difficult for suppliers, even when considering anomalies. Yet an AR / MR solution will do just that for patients needing heart surgery. This helps surgeons to compare 3D reconstructions with various ways from MRI or CT scans. More significantly, it helps surgeons to continue to shift their viewpoint until they know what they need to know. They can imagine how similar systems are to each other, and find feasible inner paths.
Rib Plating:
Research by a coursework writing service shows that while most Rib fractures are left to heal on their own, some clinicians use a complicated technique called rib plating to treat complex cases. In this process, doctors use titanium plates and screws to realign and strengthen sore fractured ribs to “bridge” the breaks. Rib plating allows the patient to rise and fall naturally in the chest and helps to minimize complications such as chronic short- and long-term pain, pneumonia, or decreased lung function. Some trauma surgeons used AR / MR technology to make it easier to imagine and identify the location of each broken rib during surgical planning — thus reducing the size of the incision, the operating time, the recovery period, and the risk of infection.
Biopsy:
There is little about the procedure, particularly when a scan shows an area of concern that does not require medical vulnerability. Not only do women have to deal with the ambiguity of a possible cancer diagnosis, but they also frequently have to undergo exhausting, intrusive localization of lesions, and biopsy procedures. Traditionally, radioactive seeds or wires are inserted into the breast, so that doctors can identify a suspected tumor’s location. However, with AR / MR technology, surgeons can directly superimpose a mammographic image onto the body to enable simplified surgical planning and navigation, with the potential to significantly enhance patient experience and minimize needless vulnerability.
AR has the ability for the medicine to revolutionize. During surgery, AR systems have the most comprehensive way of delivering medical imaging data and other patient information that is superimposed on the operating area. Besides, AR aided navigation systems can reduce the risk of complications and improve the safety and quality of surgery, AR education systems train tomorrow’s surgeons to acquire critical skills and AR rehabilitation concepts help patients recover more quickly after surgery. While work in the field of Medical Augmented Reality is rapidly evolving.
