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Designing and Building the Vein Finder System Utilizing Near-Infrared

Technique

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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-13-5859-3_68

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 Designing and Building the Vein Finder
System Utilizing Near-Infrared Technique
Long Thanh Tran and Hien Thi-Thu Pham
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 tech-
nique 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 investiga-
tion and experiments, a verification method for accurate
and real-time projection of the enhanced imaged onto the
human skin can be developed.
L. T. Tran
H. T.-T. Pham (&)
Biomedical Engineering Department, International University—
Vietnam National University HCMC, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
e-mail: ptthien@hcmiu.edu.vn
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
V. Van Toi et al. (eds.), 7th International Conference on the Development of Biomedical Engineering
in Vietnam (BME7), IFMBE Proceedings 69, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5859-3_68




Keywords


Venipuncture Near-infrared Camera board
Filtering and processing Back-projection
1 Introduction
Recently, Near-Infrared (750–1400 nm) Imaging (NIR) has
significantly attracted the attention of many medical scien-
tists and practitioners as a non-invasive method of acquiring
images of veins near the surface of skin efficiently. It has
been scientifically proven to be useful assistance in phle-
botomy procedure performed on patients and a remarkable
tool in medical diagnostic [1]. Hence, this device aids more
support in the vein tracking process of the phlebotomists
because venipuncture is an essential part of clinical testing,
donation, or medical research.
The principle of this project is the method of vein
imaging, which relies on the variation of light absorption
parameters between venous blood and surrounding tissue to
capture the image of the venous system non-invasively.
Together with some digital image enhancement techniques,
a system is designed with a NIR light source (850 nm), a
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B micro-controller, a NoIR camera
board, DLPDLCR2010EVM projector, and a laptop (or
computer) with MATLAB installed as an image processor.
The experimental results exhibit an acceptable venous
image of some chosen samples. The image projection is also
initially possible using the adjustments in the projector’s
software and the method of reference points. This vein finder
system is believed to have a lot of future potentials to be
developed in many orientations such as venous disease
diagnosis, more accurate image re-projection, or vein finder
smartphone application.
383
384
2 Principle of Near-Infrared Imaging in Vein
Illuminator
The unique characteristic of NIR radiation is it can penetrate
into biological tissue up to a depth of about 3 mm, in which
the veins are located. Arteries are more deeply seated than
veins and NIR cannot penetrate further beyond 3 mm.
Moreover, in contrast with arterial blood which is mostly
occupied by oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO2), the reduced,
or deoxygenated, hemoglobin (Hb) in the venous blood
absorbs more of the radiation in this spectrum than the
surrounding tissue. This concept is illustrated in Fig. 1 [2],
which describes the absorption spectra of Hb and HbO2 and
water, main component of the neighbor tissues such as fat,
and muscle.
According to the figure, only Hb and HbO2 are the pri-
mary absorbers of NIR light (600–1300 nm). In this region,
venous blood still maintains a higher absorption capability
when the absorption coefficients of both oxygenated and
deoxygenated blood dramatically fall with the wavelength
beyond 600 nm. Also, there exists a peak at approximately
760 nm for HbO2, and the absorption difference between
both kinds of hemoglobin is most prominent within the 700–
900 nm range. Therefore, it is significant that the wavelength
of the NIR light source is chosen to be between 700 and
900 nm or around 760 nm, ideally.
3 Methodology
3.1 System Design
The system is built up by some essential components such as
a 12 W NIR 6-LED array (850 nm), an image capturing
device (NoIR camera), a camera controller (Raspberry Pi 3
Model 3), a computer with MATLAB installed, and a
DLPDLCR2010EVM projector.
Fig. 1 The absorption spectra of water, Hb, and HbO2
L. T. Tran and H. T.-T. Pham
As can be seen from Fig. 2, at the first stage, the NIR
light source will be operated to emit NIR light to the skin
surface of the skin. Because of the absorption of Hb, the
image of the venous system can be captured by a NoIR
Camera Board connected to Raspberry Pi. From the con-
troller, the image is transferred to the computer to perform
the image enhancement and noise filtering process on
MATLAB. Finally, the resulting image is either display on
the screen or re-projected on the skin by the projector.
3.2 Software Implementation
Figure 3 illustrate the programming procedure of the system.
Two most crucial image processing technique will be dis-
cussed thoroughly: median filtering and adaptive histogram
equalization.
3.3 Median Filtering
Median filtering is a nonlinear method used to remove noise
from images without eliminating the edges and lines. Specif-
ically, the median filter works by replacing each pixel of the
image with the median of all pixels in a neighborhood x.
y½m; n ¼ medianfx½i; j; ði; jÞ 2 xg ð1Þ
where x represents a neighborhood defined by the user
whose center is around location ½m; n in the image. In this
approach, 2D median filter, in which the median of all pixel
value inside the window is applied as the replacement for the
pixel at the center is performed on the snapshot image [3].
3.4 Adaptive Histogram Equalization
This technique is only executable as long as the image is
converted to grayscale. The histogram is the plot of the
number of pixels for each intensity value. In this method, the
image is divided into distinct sections whose histograms are
computed separately. After that, the tonal values of the
image are redistributed according to their probability distri-
bution function. Consequently, the visual contrast is con-
siderably enhanced along with the sharpness. In our
implementation, adaptive histogram equalization is per-
formed twice to increase the effectiveness of the method [4].
3.5 Back-Projection Methodology
It can be analyzed that the real-time image of the veins as a
consequence of the MATLAB program only occupies a
Designing and Building the Vein Finder System …
Fig. 2 The system components
Image capturing system
NIR light
Fig. 3 Flowchart of the system
Start
End
Output image
central part of the computer screen. This means that the
output of the projection through the HDMI port will be
extremely distracted as the whole screen is projected on the
skin. Therefore, it is required that the input need to be
cropped to only the part of the venous image.
As can be seen from Fig. 4, the cropping transaction is
accomplished by controlling the 24-bit parallel I2C interface
of the DLPDLCR2010EVM with a unique programming
language that is not compatible with other prevalent and
standardized ones such as C++, Python, MATLAB. First of
all, from the resolution of the input HDMI display, the
coordinate (X, Y) of the pixel where the crop will be started
is determined. Following that, the number of lines and pixels
per line are called to indicates the width and height of the
cropped image. At the last stage, the cropped pixels can be
scaled to an arbitrary resolution as long as it is rational with
the input venous image before being projected [5].
Fig. 4 Steps of image cropping procedure
385
Digital image processing
Projector
RGB image to
Input image grayscale image Median filtering
conversion
Image display Adaptive histo-
or re-projection gram equalization
4 Results
4.1 Hardware Design and On-Screen Results
of Volunteers
Figure 5 describes the design of the image capturing system
including a camera board attached at the center of a 6-LED
array ring, all of which are connected to the ports of Rasp-
berry Pi 3 Model B. The computer controls this system via
the Ethernet port on Raspberry Pi.
In the next part of the research, 24 volunteers (14 females,
10 males) with various age groups and BMI indexes repre-
senting the amount of fat under the skin are invited to
examine the operation of the design. There are 5 children
and teenagers (8–14 years old), 11 adults (18–34 years old)
in the volunteer’s group, whereas, the remaining people are
in middle ages (44–64 years old). Their left or right wrist is
NIR illuminated and captured by the system, the resulting
images are displayed on the screen of the computer, as
shown in Fig. 6.
4.2 Back-Projection of the Results onto the Skin
The research is currently investigated on the projection of
the venous image onto the volunteers’ wrists. Two subjects
386
Fig. 5 Hardware design of the image capturing system
are undergoing the experiments of this process. Subject 1 is a
21-year-old man, while the other is a 55-year-old woman,
whose right hands are the location for image capturing and
re-projecting. Their hands are stabilized on the table in both
cases.
Fig. 6 Resulting venous images
of the wrists of 24 volunteers
L. T. Tran and H. T.-T. Pham
However, to assure that the venous image accurately
illuminates the subject’s hand at the right position, a cali-
bration method is proposed, in which the subject’s wrist is
marked with three white dots by a special ink that prevents
transmittance of NIR light. Therefore, the on-screen
enhanced image also contains these dots. After that, these
images are projected back onto the skin in a way such that
the reference points must be accurately fixed with their
original ones, indicating the accurate projection [4]. The
procedure is illustrated in Fig. 7.
5 Discussion and Implementations
5.1 Evaluation of the Results
According to Fig. 6, after the contrast enhancement process,
in almost every subject, the veins are more easily located as
their color is significantly darkened and conversely, the other
tissues appear with a higher brightness. Furthermore, there is
a development in the re-projection of the image onto
human’s skin although the procedure only pauses at the
experiments. Indeed, the application of the DLP LightCrafter
Display 2010 EVM in a new approach of the project is
considerable because the problems of operating a new pro-
jector module that uses I2C interface to control is overcome
and the quality of the output is comparable to the commer-
cialized products regarding resolution.
Nevertheless, it can be easily observed that the current
design has a bunch of raw connection wires to link the
components together such USB, HDMI, power supply
cable… which makes the product look extraordinarily
anesthetic and not portable. In case of tiny and deep veins
such as those from the children and teenagers group, the
Designing and Building the Vein Finder System …
Fig. 7 Original hands and venous image re-projection on the hands of subject 1 (two leftmost images) and subject 2 (two rightmost images)
image is blurred or may not be obtained. In addition, the task
of image projection has no guarantee that the venous image
is illuminating the right anatomical parts because the method
using reference points are temporary and it contains many
errors regarding distance and angle.
5.2 Implementations
The next progression, the research can develop the software
and graphical user inter-face to obtain more emphasizing
venous images and a friendlier program for every-one other
than the engineers to operate the system. Moreover, inno-
vative system will be designed with proper components
arrangement for both the NIR camera and the projector for
the real-time operation. Therefore, a method in which a
camera and projector are placed in different axes is proposed.
On account of the modification of the axes, the visual con-
flict between the input of the camera and the output of the
projector is completely eliminated. In the proposed method,
the software program requires an additional technique called
homography transformation to correct the angle variances
between the camera and projector [6, 7].
6 Conclusion
To sum up, this analyzing vein image system will provide
the safest way for venipuncture shortly due to non-invasive
characteristic of NIR technology. The hardware components
are the state-of-the-art modules that are popularly available
on the market. In addition, the image processing algorithm is
an innovative version of other researches. By looking at the
vein-illuminating images displayed on the screen, the
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387
phlebotomists would deal with no trouble in searching for
the accurate vessels for blood drawing or venipuncture as the
venous image appears clearly and sharply among the sur-
rounding tissues. In the future, the achievement of a
real-time projectable vein finder device, together with an
aesthetically satisfying design will even emphasize the
beneficial effects of this research in Vietnam’s medical
system.
Acknowledgements This research is funded by International
University—VNUHCM under grant number T2017-01- BME.
Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of
interest.
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