What’s more impressive than highly sophisticated imaging techniques creating digital pictures of the inner body? Allowing those medical images to be displayed directly on a patient’s body as they move.

Graduate student Ian Watts, a computing science student at the University of Alberta developed an augmented reality technology—ProjectDR—that uses a motion-tracking system, infrared cameras and markers on a patient’s body to project CT scans and MRI data directly onto the human body, according to a University of Alberta news story.

Okay, the technology may not be quite as impressive as MRI and CT machines, but Watts, who received help from fellow graduate student Michal Fiest, believe their creation could have significant real-world impact.

“There are lots of applications for this technology, including in teaching, physiotherapy, laparoscopic surgery and even surgical planning,” Watts said in the story.

ProjectDR may not be ready for the clinical setting yet, but it’s well on the way.

“Soon, we’ll deploy ProjectDR in an operating room in a surgical simulation laboratory to test the pros and cons in real-life surgical applications,” said Pierre Boulanger professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and Cisco Chair in Healthcare Solutions in the news story.