Designing and Building the Vein Finder System Utilizing Near-Infrared Technique

Abstract

The process of venipuncture is a necessity for obtaining intravenous access for intravenous therapy or blood sampling of venous blood. Therefore, a vein finder system is an effective solution not only to make venipuncture safe and accurate but also to reduce anxiety and stress of patients and to improve donation comfort and efficiency. Vein visualization technology utilizes noninvasive infrared technology in capturing the real-time venous image on the patient’s skin and making it observable. In the procedure executed by this system, the sample’s skin is exposed to the near-infrared (NIR) light transmitted from an 850 nm 12 W 6-LED array. Following this, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, connected with NoIR Camera Board, is utilized as an image acquisition equipment to capture the NIR illuminated skin area. Next, the raw data will be transferred to the computer to perform the filtering and processing technique before being displayed on the monitor. The system is examined on 24 volunteers with various age and gender groups. The output venous image is also imported to a pico-projector (Texas Instrument Inc.) for the attempt of back-projection onto the patient’s hand. In overall, the experimental results are capable of distinguishing the differences in the contrast and brightness between the veins and the surrounding tissues on the wrists of the samples. It is anticipated that, with further investigation and experiments, a verification method for accurate and real-time projection of the enhanced imaged onto the human skin can be developed.