HAXIO

Using AI to detect contaminants in syringes

Haxio specializes in industrial vision. It was hired by a client to create a mechanism to efficiently inspect syringes pre-filled with saline solution. Since the syringes will be used by healthcare professionals, care must be taken to ensure that they contain no contaminants, that they are sufficiently full and that they generally do not present other defects.

Until then, this work had been done by employees. Eyes squinted, they watched the syringes parade before them at a pace dictated by the machine. Concentrating on these objects that all looked alike, they had to do their best to find the defects: particles, level too low or too high, cap badly placed. Not only was the risk of error significant, but the task was so demanding that employees had to rotate every 15 minutes to be able to maintain their performance.

Clearly, an industrial vision system could mitigate this shortcoming, but current solutions on the market were so expensive that they were only attractive for syringes filled with very expensive drugs.

So Haxio leaned into the problem to build an efficient and less expensive machine. It quickly became apparent that a traditional approach with machine vision would not produce great advances. Such a system would call for programming "if...then” rules. The program had to be told to evaluate each pixel so that if a pixel were black, according to this or that condition, it must conclude that the syringe is to be eliminated. The pitfall is that you have to imagine all possible situations to write enough rules that allow you to achieve high accuracy.