Prototype and evaluation of automatic fingertip-blood-sampling system that uses fingertip blood-vessel images to determine puncture position

• Published in: Medical engineering & physics Vol. 125; p. 104121
• Main Authors: Takenaka, Kei, Oyamada, Yuji, Kato, Masahiro, Nagasaka, Akio, Hokari, Junpei, Irie, Takashi, Tsukada, Nobuhiro, Yanagida, Atsushi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01.03.2024
• Subjects: Automatic blood-sampling devices; Blood Specimen Collection - methods; Blood-sampling tube; Female; Fingers; Fingertip-blood-sampling; Fingertip-blood-vessel image; Humans; Lancet; Male; Blood-sampling tube; Fingertip-blood-vessel image; Lancet; Fingertip-blood-sampling; Automatic blood-sampling devices
• ISSN: 1350-4533; 1873-4030
• DOI: 10.1016/j.medengphy.2024.104121

•A mechanism to select and puncture the vicinity of a large blood vessel.•The mechanism tends to increase the volume of sampled blood.•The mechanism is more effective in the men and those who were younger. We are developing an automatic fingertip-blood-sampling system to reduce the burden on trained medical personnel. For this system to withdraw a consistent volume of sampled blood for blood tests, we developed a mechanism for our system to select and puncture the vicinity of a large blood vessel from the blood-vessel image of an individual's fingertip. We call this mechanism the fingertip-vessel-puncture mechanism. From the results of an experiment in which the fingertips of 20 individuals (men and women in their 20 s to 60 s) were manually punctured at near and far locations from the blood vessel selected with our mechanism, the following conclusions were obtained. The fingertip-vessel-puncture mechanism tends to increase the volume of sampled blood, thus is effective in sampling more than 650 µL of blood for automatic blood analyzers. It was also found that it is more effective in increasing the volume of sampled blood in the men and those who were younger.