An improved YOLO Nano model for dorsal hand vein detection system

To date, venipuncture, the most necessary and fundamental medical means, still remains a challenging task for medical stuff due to significant individual differences in vein condition. Thanks to mature development in near-infrared (NIR) imaging technology, a series of venepuncture auxiliary equipment has been devised and put into use. Yet, previous researches concentrated more on vein pattern segmentation, failing to materialize the identification of veins suitable to puncture in an embedded system. Given the above, we propose an approach to detect and locate the optimal veins fully utilizing the state-of-the-art deep learning and image processing technologies in order to provide a more practical reference. Firstly, a dedicated NIR-based puncturable vein positioning system is designed, realizing collection of dorsal hand vein images as well as the rapid and accurate location of veins suitable to puncture. Secondly, considering the limitations of embedded devices on computation ability and memory, an improved network based on YOLO Nano, named YOLO Nano-Vein, is presented with architecture trimmed, output scales reduced, and an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) added. Finally, average precision (AP) is increased from 91.68 to 93.23%, and the detection time and parameters of network are reduced by 22% and 17.5%, respectively, which validates the proposed network achieves higher accuracy with less detection time in comparison with YOLO Nano and YOLOv3, indicating stronger applicability for detection tasks on embedded devices.