Virtual and Augmented Reality Technologies in Molecular and Anatomical Imaging

Molecular imaging (MI) plays a critical role in many aspects of the patient care continuum in modern medicine. With increasingly high-resolution systems, multimodal imaging platforms, and large datasets generated by modern MI methods, it has become imperative to develop new approaches to store, process, and visualize information. Adaptation of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to MI is an emerging trend for visualizing MI information in an intuitive format that can accommodate the growing complexity and volume of multimodal molecular information. This chapter reviews VR and AR technologies currently used to visualize medical images. It begins with a brief overview of VR and AR technologies, followed by a description of available hardware and image visualization approaches for these platforms. The chapter further describes the clinical applications of VR and AR in medical imaging and highlights existing challenges for wider adoption of these technologies before concluding with anticipated future directions.