11 accepted papers
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…
Obtaining three-dimensional information, especially the z-axis depth information, is crucial for robotic micromanipulation. Due to the unavailability of depth sensors such as lidars in micromanipulation setups, traditional depth acquisition methods such as depth from focus or depth from defocus dire…
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…
Existing approaches for robotic control of magnetic swarms are not capable of generating magnetic aggregates precisely in an arbitrarily specified target region in a fluidic flow environment. Such a swarm control capability is demanded by medical applications such as clinical embolization (i.e., loc…
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…