Detection of needle puncture to blood vessel using puncture force measurement.

Although blood sampling is frequently performed, a system to take blood samples automatically has not yet been developed. In the paper, as a first step towards automatic blood sampling, an examination of an automatic method for puncturing blood vessels is described. The force waveforms produced by puncturing rabbit ear veins were measured. A characteristic peak, possibly associated with the needle piercing the vessel wall, was observed in each waveform of ten successful cases of 14 trials. An algorithm that allowed the detection of this peak was developed, and parameters of a filter to improve the accuracy of the algorithm were determined. Using this algorithm, automatic needle punctures were performed in a rabbit ear vein and then were simulated using the data derived from manual needle puncture on four other rabbits. The results gave 30 fully successful cases of 33 trials of needle puncture and showed that measurement of the puncture force may be important for automatic needle puncture of blood vessels.