| Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) says that the human meridian adjusts the running of human vital energy and blood, and connects the inner organs with the body surface and others parts of body. People’s physiology changes and pathological changes can be made by certain electrical information reflected in human meridian. And it is a step of therapy that doctor often does acupuncture on human meridian to adjust the running of vital energy and blood. However, doctor always determines where to do acupuncture by his subjective experience, and the description of meridian and acupoints in TCM teaching uses the tags on man-simulator. In a word, the TCM description of the meridian is a lack of theoretical support and scientific research methods. Therefore, the pinpoint of meridian and acupoints, especially real-time display on human body, is important for clinical diagnosis and teaching guide.The human meridian location system in this research can display the body’s meridian lines in real time, which has three main parts:skin meridians impedance detection module, the three-dimensional coordinates of the meridian points extraction module and the meridian line visualization module. The skin meridian impedance detection module is responsible for the detection of skin impedance to be tested and extracts the acupuncture point according to the low impedance characteristic of the meridian points. The three-dimensional coordinates of the meridian points extraction module is responsible for the acquisition of three-dimensional coordinate information of the meridian points. The visualization display module completes the display of the meridian line according to the results of the skin impedance detection module and the three-dimensional coordinates of the meridian points extraction module. The accuracy of the meridian impedance detection module and its synchronization with the three-dimensional coordinate extraction module is critical to the precision of the human meridian location system.This article mainly focuses on the design of meridian impedance detector that consists of the hardware design, software development and the synchronization between the meridian data and its three-dimensional coordinates. The hardware contains electrodes system, signal generator, voltage controlled current source, isolation amplifier circuit, high-pass filter circuit, the amplitude detection circuit, the AD data acquisition circuit, the power supply module and so on. The software is realized with the modular design concept on the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 platform.The detector includes the following merits:1.The four electrode method was adopted in the detector which effectively overcome the influences brought by electrode polarization and the interface impedance between electrode and skin, so the measured impedance and the actual impedance are more consistent, and it also increased the measurement accuracy of the system.2. An 32 X 1 integrate electrodes array based on an acrylic board and spring probes was made,and the impedance and channel number of acupuncture point are acquired based on the characteristic of the lower electrical impedance. Finally, we will combine 3-D coordinates of acupuncture points which is determined by the optical means with meridian datum to finish the meridian visualization.3.A new method was proposed for matching the skin impedance data and the 3-D coordinates information based on the time slice, used the cost function to obtain the accurate 3-D coordinates of the meridian points, and it further improves the positioning accuracy of the meridian.Taking pure resistance and human body as detecting objects to do the tests in the same conditions, and the results demonstrate that the system is feasible. And it also has advantages of good real-time performance, inspection, high precision detection and so on. |
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