Camera to detect vein

A new device could help in detecting a person's vein for an injection or a drip, says a report.

A new device has been designed by biomedical engineers at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, that could help in detecting a person's vein for an injection or a drip.

The device could prevent the discomfort and delay of botched attempts to pierce veins for injections and blood tests, and to cut the time it takes to set up potentially life-saving intravenous drips.

"To stick a vein properly you need to get it in exactly the right place," Herbert Zeman, a biomedical engineer at the University of Tennessee in Memphis, was quoted as saying.

The prototype of the system, which Zeman calls a vein contrast enhancer (VCE), uses a near-infrared camera to capture a real-time video image of the patient's veins, a PC to enhance the contrast of the image and a desktop video projector to display it on the skin in real time.

"Fat and tissue look light, veins and blood look dark," says Zeman.

The image from the camera is fed to a PC running imaging software that maps the image onto a bright green background in real time and boosts the contrast between the veins and surrounding tissue. The PC then feeds this image to a projector that beams it onto the skin.

"From the patient's standpoint, anything that makes the placement of the intravenous drip easier is great," Dennis Ernst, director of the Center for Phlebotomy Education in Ramsey, Indiana.