Advanced Micro and Nanosystems Laboratory, University of Toronto, 5 King’s College Road, Toronto, ON M5S 3G8 Canada.
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2011 Jul;58(7):2102-8. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2011.2146781. Epub 2011 Apr 25.
This paper is the first report of robotic intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). ICSI is a clinical procedure performed worldwide in fertility clinics, requiring pick-up of a single sperm and insertion of it into an oocyte (i.e., egg cell). Since its invention 20 years ago, ICSI has been conducted manually by a handful of highly skilled embryologists; however, success rates vary significantly among clinics due to poor reproducibility and inconsistency across operators. We leverage our work in robotic cell injection to realize robotic ICSI and aim ultimately, to standardize how clinical ICSI is performed. This paper presents some of the technical aspects of our robotic ICSI system, including a cell holding device, motion control, and computer vision algorithms. The system performs visual tracking of single sperm, robotic immobilization of sperm, aspiration of sperm with picoliter volume, and insertion of sperm into an oocyte with a high degree of reproducibility. The system requires minimal human involvement (requiring only a few computer mouse clicks), and is human operator skill independent. Using the hamster oocyte-human sperm model in preliminary trials, the robotic system demonstrated a high success rate of 90.0% and survival rate of 90.7% (n=120).
这是第一篇关于机器人细胞质内精子注射（ICSI）的报告。ICSI 是一项在世界各地的生育诊所中进行的临床程序，需要从单个精子中提取并将其插入卵子（即卵细胞）中。自 20 年前发明以来，ICSI 一直由少数技术精湛的胚胎学家手动进行；然而，由于操作人员之间的可重复性差和不一致性，各个诊所的成功率差异很大。我们利用在机器人细胞注射方面的工作来实现机器人 ICSI，并最终旨在标准化临床 ICSI 的操作方式。本文介绍了我们的机器人 ICSI 系统的一些技术方面，包括细胞夹持装置、运动控制和计算机视觉算法。该系统能够对单个精子进行视觉跟踪、对精子进行机器人固定、以皮升级别吸取精子并以高度可重复性将精子插入卵子中。该系统需要的人工干预极少（仅需点击几下鼠标），且不依赖于操作人员的技能水平。在初步试验中，使用仓鼠卵-人精子模型，机器人系统显示出 90.0%的高成功率和 90.7%的存活率（n=120）。
