VEIN VISUALIZATION TECHNOLOGY

This article is for people who are scared of injections and added to that fear , the nurse struggling to find your vein or you’re probably used to someone jabbing at your arm for five minutes before giving up and moving to the other one because your veins are “difficult to find”. But don’t worry, this device is about to make the process a whole lot less painful. This is device which will solve our problem. It is used to project the images of veins on our hand. It works by shining near LG’s flexible TV infrared light onto your arm. The device sends infrared light and it absorbs the haemoglobin in the blood and the images are projected on the skin. It may look a little radioactive, but the device is very safe. The Near-Infrared (NIR) window defined the range of wavelength from 650 to 1350 nm where light has its maximum depth of penetration in tissue. Within the NIR window, scattering is the most dominant light-tissue interaction, and therefore the propagation light becomes diffused rapidly. Since scattering increases the distance travelled by photons within tissue, the probability of photon absorption also increases. Because scattering has weak dependence on wavelength, the NIR window is primarily limited by the light absorption of blood at short wavelengths and water at long wavelengths. The technique using this window is called NIRS. Medical imaging techniques such as fluorescence image-guided surgery often make use of the NIRS window to detect deep structures. The technology works by beaming harmless near-infrared light at your arm. Our veins contain a lot of deoxygenated haemoglobin, and because this is absorbed by infrared light, it creates an image of exactly where your veins are under the skin. Importantly, the device can be used anywhere. It’s already used widely in hospitals and pathology clinics around the world to make it easier for patients to have blood taken, but now it’s also going to help genorous citizens to donate blood. The Australian Red Cross is the first blood bank service in the world to trial this technology, and has already started using it in its Sydney clinics.