Automated System for Cell Manipulation and Rotation

Cell manipulation is an important step for microsurgical operations to extract/inject material from/within the cell. Cell manipulation may include translation and/or rotating cell to a desired position and orientation in preparing it for the next step of microsurgery. Extraction of cellular components is an essential aspect of cell surgery. The extraction must be carried out without adverse effects on the cell. The cellular material must be extracted from the desired location in the cell according to the cell type. Hence, the cell first must be manipulated and rotated precisely. The success of manual cell rotation approaches currently depends on the operator skill, which may vary over the time and from one operator to another one. Additionally, low efficiency, low repeatability and low controllability negatively impact on the process. In this article, an automatic cell rotation and manipulation system is presented, in which we propose the use of conventional tools and techniques that are in use in clinical labs now. The system will replace the manual manipulation procedure, to increase the microsurgical operations efficiency without the introduction of costly new tools and time. The proposed rotation system is efficient, simple and cost-effective. The system uses visual feedback control to rotate and visually track the cell orientation. The system can rotate the cell in the in-plane and out of plane directions. The simulation results show excellent potential for the system since it can reorient the cell with an error margin of less than 5°. The mouse embryo at the blastocyst stage is used for the system validation.