Automated in-vivo transportation of biological cells with a robot-tweezers manipulation system

Abstract

Robot-aided optical tweezers based manipulation tools have attracted increasing attention for advantages of trapping and manipulating micro/nano-scaled particles in biological environment. This paper presents a new research of using a robot-tweezers cell manipulation system to achieve in-vivo automated transportation of single red blood cells (RBCs). The position information of RBCs, extracted via image processing, is used as the feedback signal for the closed-loop tracking control. The experiment of transporting a single RBC in a living zebrafish demonstrates that such a closed-loop controlled robot-tweezers manipulation technology can transfer the cells precisely in vivo.