Robotic Micromanipulation of Biological Cells with Friction Force-Based Rotation Control

摘要

Cell manipulation is a critical procedure in related biological applications such as embryo biopsy and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), where the biological cell is required to be oriented to the desired position. To bridge the gap between the techniques and the clinical applications, a robotic micromanipulation method, which utilizes friction forces to rotate the cell with standard micropipettes, is presented in this paper. Force models for both in-plane and out-of-plane rotations are well established and analyzed for the rotation control. For better controllability, calibration steps are also designed for adjusting the orientation of the micropipette with a more efficient way. A cell orientation recognition algorithm based on the superpixel segmentation and spectral clustering is reported and achieved high validation accuracy (96%) for estimating the orientation of the oocyte. The extracted visual information further facilitates the feedback control of cell rotation. Experimental results show that the overall success rate for the cell rotation control was about 95% with orientation precision of ±1°.