Project Overview

Intravenous injection (I.V.) is a procedure where a needle is used to penetrate and inject drugs and/or materials into a vein. I.V. is often performed on mice in research labs, however, it can be difficult to accurately inject into the vein due to the small vessel sizes of mice. The average diameter of lateral tail veins are 0.3 mm. The Cai Lab, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, performs tail vein injections with 27-30 G needle tips, which have an outer diameter of 0.41-0.31 mm. Warming the tail in warm water (40-45 degrees Celsius) helps to dilate the blood vessels, but it does not significantly improve the success rates of injection. In addition, the variability in vein depth, skin hardness, and difficulty of needle visualization due to mice tail color can make I.V. more challenging. Current techniques to improve tail vein injections involve increasing the contrast of blood vessel veins by illuminating white light from LEDs onto the tail. However, problems with this technique are that the illuminating LEDs do not help visualize the needle tip. The project will develop a device with the following purpose: visualize the needle tip of the syringe once it has penetrated the mouse tail. The device will not provide depth measurements. The goal of this device is to improve the efficiency of mouse tail vein injection.

Team Picture

Contact Information

Team Members

• Lisa Xiong - Team Leader
• Kavya Vasan - Communicator
• Samantha Barr - BSAC
• Zachary Gahl - BWIG
• Hunter Hefti - BPAG

Advisor and Client

• Prof. Randolph Ashton - Advisor
• Mr. Miao Li - Client