A fundamental study on vessel position estimation based on refocusing using light field imaging

Venipuncture is a medical practice which is ordinarily performed in hospital. However, it is a difficult procedure as the occurrence of many failure of the puncture and sometimes medical accidents such as nerve damage and blood vessel damage are reported. This is caused by the difficulty of visually identification of the blood vessel. Although the depth information of the blood vessel is also important, the existing system in clinical practice can visualize vessels only by two dimensional images. In this paper, to estimate the three dimensional position of the blood vessel, we propose the system based on refocusing using light field imaging. This method can obtain cross-sectional information of blood vessel emphasized using near infrared light at each depth. We finally confirm the validity of the proposed method by experiments.