Development of a low-cost microcomputer based vein imaging system

• Published in: Infrared physics & technology 2019-05, Vol.98, p.27-35
• Main Authors: Yildiz, Mustafa Zahid, Boyraz, Ömer Faruk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: IR vein imaging system; Microcomputer; Pixel based comparison; Raspberry Pi
• ISSN: 1350-4495; 1879-0275
• DOI: 10.1016/j.infrared.2019.02.010

•A low cost microcomputer based dorsal hand-vein IR imaging system was developed.•Highly accurate vein segmentation (∼95%) based on pixel to pixel comparison technique was accomplished.•Pre- and Post-processing were operated on the Raspberry Pi Microcomputer.•Near-real time image processing was achieved by OpenCv library in Phyton Language. In this study, a low-cost microcomputer based dorsal hand-vein imaging system was developed by utilizing non-invasive near infrared imaging technology for the patients having hand vein visibility problems. On the microcomputer, we established a new database with high-quality dorsal-hand vein images. Pre- and post-processing were accomplished in Python language using Open-CV library on the microcomputer. Then, the specialist examined the whole obtained raw vein images to detect blood veins by marking the vein areas on a touch screen monitor, namely the reference images. The accuracy of the vein segmentation of our imaging system was assessed by comparing the reference images and the processed images on the microcomputer. We offered a novel simple pixel to pixel algorithm to test the segmented vein areas by the system. In addition, 2-D cross correlation algorithm was used for a secondary analysis. The average accuracy result of the 2-D cross correlation algorithms was 83.84% while pixel-based algorithm offered 94.47%. According to the results, we may conclude that the proposed vein imaging system do not produce suspicious unrelated vein areas which might create another clinical problem for the patients.