Kochi-based entrepreneurs help get the right view on your veins

A slap on the skin, warm, or palpate it...nursing practitioners do this and more to find a vein to draw blood or inject a medicine.

Difficult as it is to inject a child or get a vital medicine into the languid veins of a cancer patient after the trauma of chemotherapy, the situation becomes clumsy and painful in obese people or aged patients.

Kochi-based Medtra Innovative Technologies hopes to alleviate that pain with its non-invasive, near-infrared vein viewer Veineux that is based on augmented reality. It superimposes a computer-generated image on the patient’s body and gives the medical practitioner a composite view for tracking a vein.

It may not be a ground-breaking technology, but what is special is its price, say Saj Sulaiman, Chairman, and Sujith Surendran, Managing Director, of the medical devices company. It is cheaper by at least a fifth than the US or Chinese brands that currently rule the domestic market, they say.

The device works by emitting near-infrared light, which is absorbed by hemoglobin in the blood and then reflected by surrounding tissue. The information is processed digitally by the unit, and projected in real time onto the skin. This provides an accurate and real-time image of the patient’s blood pattern.

Seemingly simple, tracking a vein is one of the most difficult jobs for medical practitioners. The vein viewer reduces the number of cannulation attempts (where a cannula is inserted into the vein), thereby helping vein preservation. And this becomes important as life expectancy increases, entailing frequent medical procedures on patients through their lifetime.

Jose Paul, neonatologist, Aster Medicity, agrees the product would help babies. “It is also true in the case of elderly patients and oncology patients, who require repeated intravenous procedures,” he says. AM Anand, a senior consultant pediatrician and neonatologist, agrees. “Any innovation that can help in locating vein with minimum pricks will be welcome by the patients as well as doctors and nurses.”

As a parent, Tess Cherian is delighted that the device can minimise a child’s pain. Minu Chacko, a Kozhikode-based doctor and mother of two, agrees. She had a terrible time watching paramedics repeatedly plunge the needle into the arm of her one-year-old baby wheeled into the Casualty after fever-related seizures.

Clear vein illumination would also improve treatment procedures for obese patients and those with varicose problems, says Ashy JD Paul, a staff nurse. But Suryakanth, a para-medic at a private medical laboratory, worries if the infra-red light used might cause skin reaction in some subjects, especially infants. Company officials say, a “near-infrared light source” is not harmful to the human body.

Veins are the carriers of blood in our body, accessed for blood to test for medical procedures or to administer medicines into the body. “Sometimes these procedures might lead to failure which causes pain, skin ablation and hematoma. These can even lead to prolonged blood clots. Therefore, finding the right vein at the right time is very important in the medical field,” explain Medtra’s honchos. And in an emergency, finding the right vein and fast can mean life or death. And here, a view-finder becomes critical.

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