Zhai Rongan, Shan Guanqiao, Dai Changsheng, Hao Miao, Zhu Junhui, Ru Changhai, Sun Yu
School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China.
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G8, Canada.
Micromachines (Basel). 2022 Aug 12;13(8):1301. doi: 10.3390/mi13081301.
Denudation is a technique for removal of the cumulus cell mass from oocytes in clinical intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Manual oocyte denudation requires long training hours and stringent skills, but still suffers from low yield rate and denudation efficiency due to human fatigue and skill variations across operators. To address these limitations, this paper reports a robotic system for automated oocyte denudation. In this system, several key techniques are proposed, including a vision-based contact detection method for measuring the relative z position between the micropipette tip and the dish substrate, recognition of oocytes and the surrounding cumulus cells, automated calibration algorithm for eliminating the misalignment angle, and automated control of the flow rate based on the model of oocyte dynamics during micropipette aspiration and deposition. Experiments on mouse oocytes demonstrated that the robotic denudation system achieved a high yield rate of 97.0 ± 2.8% and denudation efficiency of 95.0 ± 0.8%. Additionally, oocytes denuded by the robotic system showed comparable fertilization rate and developmental competence compared with manual denudation. Our robotic denudation system represents one step towards the automation and standardization of ICSI procedures.
剥除卵丘细胞是临床卵胞浆内单精子注射（ICSI）中从卵母细胞上去除卵丘细胞团的一种技术。手动卵母细胞剥除需要长时间的培训和严格的技能，但由于人为疲劳和操作人员之间的技能差异，其产量率和剥除效率仍然较低。为了解决这些局限性，本文报道了一种用于自动卵母细胞剥除的机器人系统。在该系统中，提出了几种关键技术，包括用于测量微吸管尖端与培养皿底物之间相对z位置的基于视觉的接触检测方法、卵母细胞和周围卵丘细胞的识别、用于消除未对准角度的自动校准算法，以及基于微吸管抽吸和沉积过程中卵母细胞动力学模型的流速自动控制。对小鼠卵母细胞的实验表明，机器人剥除系统实现了97.0±2.8%的高产率和95.0±0.8%的剥除效率。此外，与手动剥除相比，机器人系统剥除的卵母细胞显示出相当的受精率和发育能力。我们的机器人剥除系统代表了ICSI程序朝着自动化和标准化迈出的一步。
