Dose Preparation Imaging With ROI Cropping for Reliable Verification
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional pharmacy management techniques face inefficiencies and errors in preparing medical doses due to reliance on physical labels, manual record-keeping, and lack of reliable consultation of FDA-approved protocols, leading to unprepared, lost, or duplicate doses, and increased administrative overhead.
Innovation Solution
A medical dose preparation management system that automates the tracking and verification of medical doses through digital image capture and processing, using an imaging device and processor to identify regions of interest in images, reducing image data size without compromising resolution, and allowing for high-speed documentation and quality assurance.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If physical labels are used to track medical doses, then pharmacy personnel can manually monitor dose preparation status, but the system becomes prone to errors including lost or duplicate doses and requires increased administrative overhead
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces the mechanical system of physical labels and manual tracking with an automated imaging and processing system. The imaging device captures images of dose preparation areas, and the processor automatically identifies and tracks medication receptacles, eliminating the need for physical labels and manual record-keeping by pharmacy personnel.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent creates digital copies of the physical dose preparation environment through imaging. Instead of using physical labels to represent doses, the system captures visual images of the preparation area and processes them to create a digital record of dose status, location, and preparation progress, thereby eliminating physical tracking artifacts.
2Loss of information
If the entire imaging field is captured and stored, then complete documentation of the preparation area is achieved, but the amount of image data requires excessive memory resources
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the relevant portions of the imaging field for storage and processing. The processor identifies regions of interest containing medication receptacles and isolates these specific areas from the complete imaging field, storing only the extracted relevant data rather than the entire image, thereby reducing memory requirements while preserving essential documentation.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent applies different quality levels to different portions of the image data. High-resolution detailed documentation is maintained for regions containing medication receptacles (regions of interest), while other areas of the imaging field are either reduced in resolution or excluded from storage, optimizing the balance between documentation completeness and resource consumption.
3Reliability
If manual verification of doses by pharmacists is required, then quality assurance can be performed, but the process requires pharmacists to enter the clean room wearing protective clothing which consumes time and resources
Solution Approach 1:
The patent replaces the mechanical process of physical verification by pharmacists entering the clean room with an automated imaging and processing system. The imaging device continuously monitors the preparation area, and the processor automatically verifies dose preparation accuracy by identifying medication receptacles and comparing them against order information, eliminating the need for physical pharmacist intervention in the controlled environment.
Solution Approach 2:
The system enables self-verification through automated processing. The imaging and processing system independently performs quality assurance functions by automatically detecting and verifying dose preparation details without requiring external human verification, allowing the system to self-monitor and self-verify preparation accuracy.
Data Source
AI summary
Use of improved image acquisition for a medical dose preparation system. The medical dose preparation system may include a work station for capturing medical dose preparation images (e.g., to document preparation of a mediation dose). The medical dose preparation image may be captured by a video data stream processor capable of performing an auto cropping technique on a video data stream received from an image device. Accordingly, memory resources may be more efficiently employed while maintaining high quality medical dose preparation images.