Veebot
The old way of blood drawing[edit]
Venipuncture is hardly 100 years old. And during this period almost nothing has changed.
The procedure is traditionally guided by visual inspection and palpation of the peripheral forearm veins:A medical technician briefly wraps your arm in a tourniquet and looks your veins over, sometimes tapping gently with a gloved finger on your inner elbow. Once a suitable vein is located, a needle is then inserted into the center of the vessel.
Problems[edit]
1-This procedure is fine for the typical blood test at a doctor’s office, but for contract researchers it represents a significant logistics problem. In drug trials it’s not unusual to have to draw blood from dozens of people every hour or so throughout a day. These tests can add up to more than a hundred thousand blood draws a year for just one contract research company.
2- In total, failure rates are reported to occur in 30–50% of attempts.In each failure, the doctor doesn’t get to a vein from the first attempt and it involves not only additional expenses for medical institutions, but also leads to complications at patients.
3- Patients are still afraid of pain and needles.
4- Thousands of medical workers still suffer from undeliberate needle injuries every day. This problem is not usually talked about, but these injuries are a real epidemic that can result in infection or even such diseases as HIV and hepatitis. Only in the United States $1 billion is spent annually for the solution of this problem.
5- Oftentimes, however, it is difficult to estimate the depth of the vein or steer the needle if the vein moves or rolls. In these situations, it is easy for the needle tip to slip and miss the vein or pierce through the back of the vein wall. Poorly introduced needles may then result in complications such as increased pain, internal bleeding, or extravasation.
6- The challenges of venipuncture are exacerbated in obese and dark-skinned patients where locating a vein can be difficult, as well as in pediatric and geriatric populations where the veins are often small and weak.
7- In total, difficult venous access is estimated to cost the U.S. health care system $4.7 billion annually.
Veebot,a good solution[edit]
There’s a new way to draw blood from patients with a high accuracy than a human. It’s called Veebot, the Robotic Phlebotomist that can ultimately speed up the process of drawing blood or inserting IVs.
At the moment Veebot defines a vein arrangement in 83% of cases, which is about as good as a human. By the beginning of clinical tests developers plan to increase this indicator to 90%.
History[edit]
Veebot was founded in 2010 by a team of Princeton and Stanford engineers and a Duke Medical physician.
The idea started in 2009, when Richard Harris and Joe Mygatt, two third-year undergraduates in Princeton’s mechanical engineering department, were studying engineering at Stanford University and they were trying to come up with a topic for a project.
At the same time, Richard’s father, Stuart Harris, founder of a company that does pharmaceutical contract research, faced a problem of large amount of blood sampling that should have been done in short terms, while the patients had poor veins and fear of the needle.He mentioned that he’d love to see someone come up with a way to automate blood draws.
Richard Harris and Joe Mygatt decided to solve the problem of Richard's father. They found that all methods existing at that time used either long-wavelength infrared or ultrasonics for identification of veins. Their aim was to create a machine that could combine accuracy and continuity with anatomic data taken from ultrasonics and long-wavelength infrared images. First, they designed a prototype that could find and puncture dots drawn on flexible plastic tubing, and with funding from Richard’s father, they cofounded Veebot in 2010.
Harris says he was drawn to the idea because “it involved robotics and computer vision, both fields I was interested in, and it had demanding requirements because you’d be fully automating something that is different every time and deals with humans.”
In 2012, Veebot was selected to be a member of the Stanford StartX Med program. Today, Veebot has a working prototype that has performed over 25 successful insertions on a wide variety of subjects, and two patents with another pending.
Today Veebot team includes qualified graduates from Harvard, Stanford and other leading universities.
How it works[edit]
Veebot scans the patient’s arm using a visual analysis capability to select the vein. While seated,the patient puts his or her arm through an archway over a padded table.
Inside the archway, an inflatable cuff, which acts as a tourniquet, tightens around the arm, holding it in place and restricting blood flow to make the veins easier to see.
In order that it is correct to define a place where there is a vein,an infrared light illuminates the inner elbow for a camera; software matches the camera’s view against a model of vein anatomy and selects a likely vein. (The vein is traced and allocated in real time to avoid any mistakes resulting from patient's movement during the procedure.)
The vein is examined with ultrasound to confirm that it’s large enough and has sufficient blood flowing through it. Ultrasonic color doppler also estimates the vein depth under the skin. Then vessel is fixed by the robotic machine to avert its twirling.
Finally the needle controlled by the ultrasonic imaging is inserted into the determined vein.
After completion of procedure all blood samples are marked and all needles are thrown off by the unit.
The unit is also equipped with a touch screen.Users can interact with Veebot through the touch screen in case they want to tell the system where to insert a needle.
The whole process with Veebot takes about a minute.
Advantages[edit]
Veebot is the first fully automated machine that determines the blood vessel, blood flow in it, performs insertion and replaces the needle.
Human staff performs just supervision and control of the whole procedure, without any direct participation in it.
Of course the robot won’t be taking over any jobs. The technician still has to attach the appropriate test tube or IV bag,position the arm,disinfect the arm and clean the puncture afterwards.
It guarantees safety for both patients and staff which is economically effective for medical institutions.
Totally,Veebot helps to eliminate such problems, as inaccuracy, fault,time wasting, big expenditures, life threatening injuries and administrative mistakes.
Disadvantages[edit]
The biggest challenge is human psychology. If people don’t want a robot drawing their blood, then nobody is going to use it.
The size and weight of the robotic arm may limit the clinical usability of the system.
References[edit]
https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/medical-robots/profile-veebot
https://forcetoknow.com/hi-tech/veebot-robot-capable-to-take-blood-from-a-vein-more-safely-than-a-human.html
https://spinoff.com/veebot
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4527661/
https://www.veebot.com/
https://z6mag.com/featured/new-way-to-draw-blood-veebot-a-robot-phlebotomist-with-83-percent-accuracy-1622258.html
Veebot[edit]
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