Method to obtain the high contrast images of blood vessel for oxygen saturation calculation

The skin illuminated of two lights at different wavelength can be applied to detect the oxygen saturation of human blood. Due to the absorption coefficient of oxy- (HbO2) and deoxy- (Hb) hemoglobin are different at the wavelength 660 nm and 890 nm, the transmitted and reflected light within the skin can be used to compute the oxygen saturation image of skin. However, the intensities of skin images illuminated by a 20 mW NIR-LED are too low to determine the position of blood vessel when acquired by the color CCD camera. In order to improve the disadvantages, a mono camera was used and the irradiated distance and angle between LED light and test hand were adjusted to acquire the higher resolution and contrast blood vessel images for the oxygen saturation calculation. In the experiment, we developed the suitable angle to irradiate NIR light is at 75 degrees because the reflected and scattered effect could be generated significantly from both vertical and horizontal direction. In addition, the best contrast vessel images can be obtained when the shutter time is set at 44.030 ms and the irradiated distance was at the range 140-160 mm due to the intensity ratio between tissue and vessel region is the highest and the intensities of image would not be saturated or become too low when these two parameters were adjusted slightly. In future, the proposed parameters and results can be applied to the oxygen saturation measurement in the clinical diagnosis.