Blood Vessel Mapping
Here's a bit of information on my third year project - the sensor head for a system to map blood vessels in a non-invasive manner.
In common with many other universities, part of the third year of my degree course requires that I undertake a project agreed with a member of the academic staff. I got assigned to the image engineering department, with Dr. Oakley as my supervisor.
After some discussion, it was deicded that between the three students that had Dr. Oakley as their supervisor, a system should be designed to map the positions of blood vessels under the skin without using any invasive techniques. My particular area was the scanning head itself.
The project is based around a similar experiment done at Linkøping University. The paper on this experiment, the specification for my project and the documentation produces as a result of my project is available for public viewing below. This may change frequently, but I'll try to update the documents after each change.
There are the documents currently available for you to look through if you're interested. They're mainly PDF documents, so Acrobat Reader or similar will be required to view them:
As shown above, the circuit has now been decided upon. After painstakingly working out how to use Protel 99 (the hardest part was working out that it's only installed on eight computers in UMIST), PCB services were able to produce the following wonderful, yet tiny board:
Since that, the circuit has been produced, tested, broken, repaired, tested again and is currently in the UMIST EEE mechanical workshop, in rather a nice assembly. Final testing in the complete system should be commencing soon, and all being well the practical side of the project will be a resounding success. After that, a small 50 page report with the odd appendix tacked on is all that's left!
Update
Well, that's what I thought. As it happens, at 2:00PM last Wednesday, I was given 47 hours notice to give a demonstration of the system. Okay, so it works, but I would still have appreciated a bit more time. Anyway, the presentation went reasonably well considering I didn't have polished fibres. More than that, though, the project report is now finished. Get your copy here, if you're so inclined.