14 accepted papers
Precise orientation of oocyte is a prerequisite for many cell manipulations, especially Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), to prevent damage to the meiotic spindle. However, automating this process presents significant challenges due to the visual ambiguity of the polar body and the complex fr
Cell penetration and intracellular injection are indispensable procedures in many cell surgery tasks. Because of the complex layered structure of oocytes, conventional piezo-assisted penetration often causes unavoidable cellular damage. Moreover, the small volume of single cells and the nonlinear dy
Video object detection (VOD) of motile cells (e.g., bacteria and sperm) under microscopy is challenging due to motion blur, sporadic out-of-focus, and pose variations. Compared with VOD in generic scenes, the lower contrast and smaller color space of microscopy imaging further introduce feature over
Automated positioning systems play a pivotal role in micro-scale cell manipulation. In clinical intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, a motile sperm needs to be immobilized by glass micropipette tapping for subsequent surgical steps. The process requires…
Traditional sperm morphology analysis is based on tedious manual annotation. Automated morphology analysis of a high number of sperm requires accurate segmentation of each sperm part and quantitative morphology evaluation. State-of-the-art instance-aware part segmentation networks follow a "detect-t…
Soft tissue cutting is used for incision, separation and removal of tissues or cells. Due to high deformation of soft tissues resulting from their viscosity and elasticity, it is challenging to accurately cut the tissue along a desired path and control the force applied to the tissue for reducing in…
Cell manipulation is a key technology in many biomedical and clinical applications, in which end-effector alignment is a critical procedure. Presently, end-effector alignment is performed manually and suffers from large misalignment error and inconsistency. Manual alignment often undesirably moves t…
Cell penetration is an indispensable step in many cell surgery tasks. Conventionally, cell penetration is achieved by passively indenting and eventually puncturing the cell membrane, during which undesired large cell deformation is induced. Piezo drills have been developed to penetrate cells with le
Aspirating a single cell from the outside to the inside of a micropipette is widely used for cell transfer and manipulation. Due to the small volume of a single cell (picoliter) and nonlinear dynamics involved in the aspiration process, it is challenging to accurately and quickly position a cell to
In biology, fluorescent dyes are routinely used for biochemical measurements such as pH and ion concentrations. They, especially when used for detecting a low concentration of ions, suffer from low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR); and increasing the concentration of fluorescent dyes causes more sever c…
Automated manipulation of single cells is required in both biological and clinical applications. In clinical infertility treatments, a single motile sperm is immobilized and inserted into an egg cell for in vitro fertilization. Sperm immobilization is essential to ease the ensuing pick-up procedure,
Robotic manipulation of deformable objects (vs. rigid objects) has been a classic topic in robotics. Compared to deformable synthetic objects such as rubber balls and clothes, biological cells are highly deformable and more prone to damage. This paper presents robotic manipulation of deformable cell…
Manipulation of motile cells such as bacteria and sperm is required in both cell biology and clinical applications. For immobilizing a motile sperm, the sperm head and tail positions must be accurately tracked, interference of proximal sperms on the target sperm must be tackled, and the orientation…
Magnetic micromanipulation is an untethered technique and has enabled numerous applications in the scale of millimeters to micrometers from the tissue level to cell level. However, existing systems are not capable of maneuvering a sub-micrometer object for precise force control, preventing the reali…