Proceedings Article | 25 September 2013
KEYWORDS: Skin, Near infrared, Absorption, Optical properties, Veins, Imaging systems, Visualization, Scattering, Tissue optics, Blood vessels
The technique of subcutaneous veins imaging by using NIR (Near Infrared Radiation) is widely used in medical
applications, such as the intravenous injection and the blood sampling. In the previous study, an automatic 3D blood
vessel search and automatic blood sampling system was newly developed. In order to validate this NIR imaging system,
we adopted the subcutaneous vein in the human arm and its artificial phantom, which imitate the human fat and blood
vessel. The human skin and subcutaneous vein is characterized as the uncertainty object, which has the individual
specificity, non-accurate depth information, non-steady state and hardly to be fixed in the examination apparatus. On the
other hand, the conventional phantom was quite distinct from the human’s characteristics, such as the non-multilayer
structure, disagreement of optical property. In this study, we develop a multilayer phantom, which is quite similar with
human skin, for improvement of NIR detection system evaluation. The phantom consists of three layers, such as the
epidermis layer, the dermis layer and the subcutaneous fat layer. In subcutaneous fat layer, we built a blood vessel. We
use the intralipid to imitate the optical scattering characteristics of human skin, and the hemoglobin and melanin for the
optical absorption characteristics. In this study, we did two subjects. First, we decide the fabrication process of the
phantom. Second, we compared newly developed phantoms with human skin by using our NIR detecting system, and
confirm the availability of these phantoms.
