An Automated Mouse Tail Vascular Access System by Vision and Pressure Feedback

This paper develops an automated vascular access system (A-VAS) with novel vision-based vein and needle detection methods and real-time pressure feedback for murine drug delivery. Mouse tail vein injection is a routine but critical step for preclinical imaging applications. Due to the small vein diameter and external disturbances such as tail hair, pigmentation, and scales, identifying vein location is difficult and manual injections usually result in poor repeatability. To improve the injection accuracy, consistency, safety, and processing time, A-VAS was developed to overcome difficulties in vein detection noise rejection, robustness in needle tracking, and visual servoing integration with the mechatronics system.