Chicago Tribune:
A New Way of Looking at Veins
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Bonnie Kath, Special to the Tribune
Excerpts from the article.
What's worse than an injection? How about two injections? But with the help of a medical device, there should be fewer failed attempts to connect with a patient's vein.
The VeinViewer can locate veins, create an image and project it onto the surface of the skin…. It uses near-infrared light, which is absorbed by blood and reflected by surrounding tissue, to create a bright green road map of blood vessels that can't otherwise be seen by the naked eye.
…Midwest Vein Centers took delivery of one of the region's first VeinViewers in the spring, and its physicians have been using it in the treatment of varicose veins, according to Dr. Stephen Rivard, medical director of the Midwest Vein Center in Glenview.
"There is an illumination issue sometimes, when you're at edges with this [older technology], and it blurs your vision; but this [VeinViewer] isn't dependent on the surface contour." The older technology to which Rivard referred uses transillumination, shining a very bright light on tissue, to locate veins.
"Let's say we find a cluster of spider veins," Rivard said. "We would look with the VeinViewer under that cluster of spider veins to see whether or not there is a reticular vein feeding into [it]. If we can make a single injection into the feeder vein, that medicine then spreads through the feeder vein and into the spider veins. The medicine can track into all of those veins and, with one single injection, we can eliminate that entire cluster."
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