Design and Development of Haemostatic Drug Delivery System

Vein localization and catheter insertion constitute the first and perhaps most important phase of many medical procedures. At present, catheterization is performed manually by trained and skilled personnel. This process can prove problematic, however, depending upon various physiological factors of the patient. In this paper initial work for localizing surface veins via near-infrared (NIR) imaging and structured light ranging has been carried out. The eventual goal of the system is to serve as the guidance for a fully automatic (i.e., robotic) catheterization device. This study aims at easing the process of vascular access to the doctor and making it automatic to a large extent and can be used to treat people in remote or hostile locations as in a battlefield as an aid to wounded soldiers where a human practitioner could not be present.

This work carried out is the conceptual prototype of an automated drug delivery system. It extracts the wrist vein structures, and selects the optimal drug needle insertion point. The gray scale images obtained from a low cost IR-webcam are poor in contrast, and usually noisy which make an effective vein segmentation a great challenge. A new vein image segmentation method is developed, based on enhancement techniques resolving the conflict between poor contrast vein image and good quality image segmentation. Gaussian and median filters are used to remove the high frequency noise in the image. The ultimate goal is to identify venous bifurcations and determine the insertion point for the needle.

The developed algorithm significantly enhances the image captured using the low cost webcam. The XY coordinates are extracted from the captured image based on the minutiae features mainly the ridge ending and ridge bifurcations. The extraction of the XY coordinate for the insertion of the haemostatic drug has been achieved using the crossing number algorithm. The 3D modelling and dimensional design of the drug delivery system has been developed using Solidworks platform. A hardware prototype has been fabricated based on the dimensional design. The motors are mounted on the hardware model and have been calibrated in order to obtain a precision of 1 mm. The acquired XY coordinates have been passed serially to the motors for automatic positioning of the syringe over the XY coordinates. We thus conclude that the developed system can successfully be used for automated drug delivery.