Development of a Three-Dimensional Blood Vessel Searching System by Using the Near Infra-Red Light

Abstract

In this study, an automatic blood vessel searching system (BVSS) is newly developed, which is built in the Health Monitoring System (HMS) and the drug delivery system (DDS) to extract the blood, evaluate the blood sugar level and inject the insulin for the diabetic patients. Main subjects of this BVSS development are 1) a transmittance photo imaging of the finger by using the LED light as the near-infrared light source with the peak wave length of 870 nm, and 2) an image processing to detect the location of the center of blood vessel. To estimate the depth of blood vessel, the lens focal method was employed in the BVSS. To confirm the availability of this method, we carried out experiments by using a skin tissue phantom having a blood vessel, whose vessel part is made of the teflon tube, and whose skin tissue part is made of the silicone rubber. The teflon blood vessel was 0.6 mm in diameter and wasfilled with the human blood. Experimental results demonstrated that the estimated depth has shown a good agreement with the given depth.