While I was pretending to be productive at lab today, I came upon this article that describes an imaging system that projects veins onto the skin, which aids in the identification of veins for venous access. “What a neat idea!” I thought, almost jumping out of my chair to tell someone before remembering that I was supposed to be “working.” If only they had something like this device to guide us poor med students through our first clumsy-not-so-pleasant-for-our-poor-victims blood draws! Especially when our poor victims are each other. I know I haven’t seen my inflictor of pain (and emotional trauma) quite the same way ever since that fateful practice blood draw day. Maybe this device could have prevented that. Or maybe not. It costs $25,000!!! But it’s still super-neat to me!
Oh, and it also gets bonus points for its other use as a method to verify identity (think fingerprinting and retinal scans).
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