| Volume 21 Issue 10 - Publication Date: 1 October 2002 |
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| Special issue on International
Symposia on Experimental Robotics 2000 |
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| Biological Cell Injection Using
an Autonomous MicroRobotic System |
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| Yu Sun and Bradley
J. Nelson Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota,
111 Church Street S.E., Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA |
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| Recent advances in microbiology,
such as cloning, demonstrate that increasingly complex micromanipulation
strategies are required for manipulating individual biological cells. In
this paper, we present a microrobotic system capable of conducting automatic
embryo pronuclei DNA injection (cell injection). Conventionally, cell injection
has been conducted manually, however, long training, low success rates from
poor reproducibility in manual operations, and contamination all call for
the elimination of direct human involvement. To automate cell injections,
a microrobotic system is developed that is capable of performing automatic
embryo pronuclei DNA injection autonomously through a hybrid visual servoing
control scheme. A Hough transform is used to detect the nuclei of embryos.
Sum-of-squared-differences optical flow is used to track injection pipette
motion, and auto focusing is implemented to determine the relative depth
of subcellular structures. A hybrid control scheme is developed to fulfill
the cell injection task. Upon the completion of injection, the DNA injected
embryos are transferred into a pseudo-pregnant foster female mouse to reproduce
transgenic mice for cancer studies. The experimental result shows that the
injection success rate is 100\%. |
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Example
One: Autonomous microrobotic cell injection process (6.8 MB) |
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