Development of three dimensional blood vessel search system by using on stereo and autofocus hybrid method.

In this study, we developed an accurate three dimensional blood vessel search (3D BVS) system and an automatic operated blood sampling system. These systems were implemented into the point-of-care system for the ubiquitous medical care, which was featured as the portable type self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) devise. It resolved the human error problem, which causes by the complicated manual operation of blood sampling and blood glucose measurement in conventional SMBG devices. In this study, we mainly discuss the performance examination of accurate position detection of blood vessel. Our 3D BVS system employed the near-infrared (NIR) light imaging process and the stereo and autofocus hybrid method to determine the 3D blood vessel location accurately. We evaluated the accuracy of our 3D BVS system by using the phantom of human skin, blood vessel and blood. As a result, we validated a very good performance ability of our 3D BVS system for a portable type SMBG device.