Some of our readers already probably know that the Cleveland Clinic is one of the finest academic hospitals in the US. Its main facility is in Cleveland, Ohio, and it’s owned and operated by the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, an Ohio nonprofit corporation established in 1921. It is nationally recognized as one of the top healthcare centers in the US and the world, particularly in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. According to the US News and World Report (USNWR), the Cleveland Clinic is ranked as the #1 hospital for heart care, and has held that title for 22 consecutive years. They have several facilities located all over the world, including Florida, Nevada, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates.
The development of the first third-party medical app for the Microsoft Hololens, the HoloAnatomy was a collaborative effort between the Cleveland Clinic and the Case Western Reserve University. This app was shown to other developers at several of Microsoft’s Build conferences, who were rightfully excited about it, but more importantly, this app established the Cleveland Clinic as a pioneer in the development of medical apps for the Hololens.
In a recent interview with Fortune Magazine, Cleveland Clinic CEO Ted Cosgrove talked about what augmented reality means for medicine. HoloAnatomy was one of the first apps available to the public in the Microsoft App Store, and although Cosgrove still considers AR and MR revolutionary for the development and teaching of anatomy, there is now an intention to begin implementing AR into clinical settings. There are even some suggestions to begin using AR/MR in different fields, such as plastic surgery and facial reconstruction. We haven’t heard nearly as much about AR/MR applications for these fields as we would like to, but you can check out Cosgrove’s perspective in the video below.
If you skipped over the interview video, we highly recommend going back and watching it, because it’s definitely worth your time. Augmented reality goes far beyond just 3D graphics–it provides a new and exciting methods for students to understand medicine in ways that we could not have even imagined five or ten years ago. Medical students’ backpacks might get a whole lot lighter in the next few years, if one AR device can provide better, more comprehensive views of anatomical structures than pages upon pages of pictures in a textbook could ever could. AR views are interactive and allow the viewer to rotate and zoom in on the picture, while also providing a description of what they are looking at. It allows students to learn in a faster, more instinctive, and easier way, all of which means a better understanding of the body and better future physicians.
This is a new era for medicine. In what we hope is the near future, medical education could all be taught using augmented reality, throwing the outdated, complicated, and ineffective methods out the window. With the amount of advances that are being made for medical technology every day, it’s no wonder that education needs to keep up to date if it wants to succeed in making the best doctors it can. AR seems like a pretty good tool for that task we think, and with institutions like the Cleveland Clinic working hard to bring advancements in the field, we’re confident that there will be no shortage of exciting new advancements in the future, and we at ARinMED will be here to tell you all about them.
Please let us know what you think about it in the comments section!
