Philips

Philips
Information
Type	Public company
Industry	Health technology, Medical devices
Founded	1891
Founder	Gerard Philips, Frederik Philips
Headquarters	Amsterdam, Netherlands
Notable Personnel	Roy Jakobs (President and CEO)
Products	Image-guided therapy systems, MRI, CT and ultrasound scanners, patient monitors, personal health products
Website	https://www.philips.com

Philips, legally Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Royal Philips), is a Dutch multinational health technology company headquartered in Amsterdam. It was founded in Eindhoven in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik, who financed an empty factory where the company began making carbon-filament lamps in 1892. After more than a century as a broad consumer-electronics and lighting conglomerate, Philips spun off its television, lighting (now Signify), and domestic-appliance businesses during the 2010s and refocused on health technology.

Philips reported sales of about 18 billion euros for the 2025 financial year and employs roughly 64,300 people, with sales and service operations in more than 100 countries. Its relevance to virtual and augmented reality comes through its medical imaging arm, in particular augmented-reality surgical navigation built into its Azurion image-guided therapy platform (marketed as ClarifEye) and a collaboration with Microsoft that brings the HoloLens 2 into the interventional cath lab.

Company background

Anton Philips, Gerard's younger brother, joined the firm in 1895 and helped build it into a large manufacturer. Through the 20th century Philips produced lighting, radios, televisions, audio equipment, and shavers, and it co-developed the Compact Disc with Sony. In the 2010s the company began divesting non-medical units: its television business passed to TP Vision, its lighting division was separated as Signify, and its domestic-appliances business was sold and rebranded as Versuni.

As of the mid-2020s Philips is organized into three reportable segments: Diagnosis and Treatment, which includes imaging systems such as MRI, CT, and ultrasound scanners and the image-guided therapy business; Connected Care, covering patient monitoring and respiratory care; and Personal Health, covering electric shavers, Sonicare toothbrushes, and mother-and-child care products. Roy Jakobs has been president and chief executive officer since October 2022 and was reappointed at the 2026 annual general meeting. A new global headquarters building in Amsterdam was opened in 2025.

Augmented reality in image-guided therapy

Philips entered augmented reality through its image-guided therapy (interventional) business, which builds the angiography systems used in catheterization labs and hybrid operating rooms. The core platform, Azurion, has been used to treat large patient populations since its 2017 introduction. Two distinct AR efforts grew out of this work: a built-in optical navigation system for spine surgery (ClarifEye), and a head-mounted holographic interface developed with Microsoft.

ClarifEye augmented reality surgical navigation

ClarifEye is an augmented-reality surgical navigation system for minimally invasive spine procedures, announced by Philips on 2 February 2021. It is integrated into the Azurion image-guided therapy platform and is used to guide pedicle screw placement during spinal fusion.

The system uses four high-resolution optical cameras mounted on the motorized C-arm of the angiography system. The cameras capture a video view of the surgical field and combine it with a three-dimensional cone-beam CT scan of the patient's internal anatomy, producing an overlaid view of external and internal structures on the same display. Patient position is tracked with non-invasive skin markers and computer vision rather than rigidly fixed reference frames, and the tip of the dedicated ClarifEye Needle is visualized as it follows a planned trajectory through the vertebra. The cone-beam CT acquisition is performed at managed (low) X-ray dose, and the integrated workflow can verify implant placement during the procedure, which can reduce the need for a separate post-operative CT scan.

ClarifEye received CE marking for the European market. At launch it was not cleared for sale in the United States, and Philips described a 510(k) submission to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as pending; sources through 2023 continued to list U.S. clearance as pending. In October 2021 Philips reported clinical use at additional international sites, including Sant Joan de Deu Barcelona Children's Hospital in Spain and the Armed Forces Hospital in Muscat, Oman, after earlier work in Switzerland, Sweden, and Germany. The system was installed in Japan in October 2022 at the International University of Health and Welfare's Mita Hospital in Tokyo.

Clinical research origins

ClarifEye is based on more than a decade of research conducted with Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, which has a research agreement with Philips Healthcare. An early cadaveric study published in 2016 reported that augmented-reality surgical navigation placed thoracic pedicle screws with higher overall accuracy than a free-hand technique (85 percent versus 64 percent).

A first-in-human prospective cohort study led by neurosurgeon Adrian Elmi-Terander and colleagues, published in the journal Spine in 2018, used a ceiling-mounted robotic C-arm with integrated optical cameras and skin-marker tracking, the configuration that became ClarifEye. The study placed 253 pedicle screws in 20 patients (one was later excluded) and reported 94.1 percent accuracy when combining Gertzbein grades 0 and 1, with no severely misplaced screws. A later clinical study published in the European Spine Journal in September 2022 reported 98 percent accuracy for pedicle screw placement with the system, which Philips cited as comparable to other navigation and robotic platforms. Philips reported in December 2021 that ClarifEye achieved 94 percent screw-placement accuracy versus 89.6 percent for open surgery without 3D navigation in published results.

Philips and Microsoft HoloLens 2

In February 2019, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Philips and Microsoft demonstrated a concept that pairs the Azurion platform with Microsoft's HoloLens 2 holographic headset. The system places live imaging and patient data, normally shown on large two-dimensional monitors in the lab, into a head-worn three-dimensional holographic workspace, and it can be operated with voice, gaze, and gesture so a physician can work hands-free at the table side. Atul Gupta, then chief medical officer for image-guided therapy at Philips, described seeing the real world superimposed with the live data and 3D medical imagery used to guide therapy, and Microsoft was represented by mixed-reality lead Alex Kipman. The demonstration positioned the HoloLens 2 as an interface to existing interventional imaging rather than a standalone product.

Relevance to VR and AR

Philips is not a maker of consumer VR or AR headsets. Its significance to the field is in medical augmented reality, where it is one of the larger imaging vendors to ship an AR navigation product integrated with a fixed-room angiography system rather than as a separate add-on. ClarifEye uses cameras on the imaging gantry and skin-marker computer vision to register the AR overlay, an approach distinct from optical-see-through head-mounted systems used by some surgical-navigation competitors. The peer-reviewed accuracy results from the Karolinska collaboration are among the more frequently cited clinical datasets for augmented-reality spine navigation. The Microsoft collaboration is one example of Microsoft HoloLens hardware being applied to interventional medicine, a recurring use case for mixed reality in clinical settings.