Laboratory study on needle-tissue interaction: Towards the development of an instrument for automatic venipuncture

Although venipuncture is one of the most common clinical procedures and is performed by trained medical staff, difficulties arise in 5% of insertion procedures. An instrument that guarantees the insertion of a needle into a vein in a single approach is expected to be beneficial to both medical staff and patients. The next step towards automatic venipuncture is to determine if insertion force feedback can be used, irrespective of insertion speed, insertion angle, or vein depth and diameter. Needle insertion experiments are performed on phantom and porcine tissues to study the interaction between the needle and tissue. A prototype instrument is developed to perform automatic venipuncture on the phantom. From the experiments, we conclude that an increased insertion speed of the needle leads to an increase in insertion force and tissue deformation. Furthermore, distinct force peaks are observed at the penetration of phantom skin and vein, thus enabling automatic detection of phantom vein puncture.