Dessouky Ashraf Hisham, El-Hussieny Haitham, El-Sherry Taymour Mohammed, Parque Victor, Fath El-Bab Ahmed M R
Department of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering, Egypt-Japan University of Science and Technology (E-JUST), Alexandria 21934, Egypt.
Mechanical Engineering Department, Helwan University, Cairo 11792, Egypt.
J Electr Bioimpedance. 2025 Mar 20;16(1):23-34. doi: 10.2478/joeb-2025-0004. eCollection 2025 Jan.
In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) and Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) are well-known fertility treatments that, due to resource-intensive, high degree of expertise required, and frequent subpar performances, often yield in high costs for treatment cycles. Microfluidic technology has enabled cost-effective egg-handling procedures towards new assistive reproductive devices: oocytes are subjected to microchannels with jagged surfaces to let shear stress remove undesirable cumulus cells, and microchannels with expansion units facilitate the transport of oocytes in chips. However, although the previous works have studied the influence of shear stress on oocyte denudation and the role of microchannel teeth in optimizing cell handling efficiency, the study of configurations of jagged surfaces and expansion units in microfluidic devices has remained elusive. Also, comprehensive analysis using both computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and real-world microfluidic devices has remained an unexplored area. To fill the abovementioned gap, this paper studies microfluidics chips with different expansion units to depict the behavior of oocytes when subjected to controlled input flows. The proposed chips were developed and fabricated using a direct engraving CO laser machine on polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) sheets and bonded in a natural ventilation lab oven, rendering the highly efficient and low-cost microfluidic chips for oocyte denudation. The effect of the expansion units has been investigated in CFD simulation and real lab experimentation with mature buffalo oocytes at a constant flow rate, and a chip with five expansion units arranged in two lines achieved 98.33% denudation efficiency, low-cost fabrication (about 1 USD), and quick fabrication time (about 20 minutes).
体外受精（IVF）和卵胞浆内单精子注射（ICSI）是众所周知的生育治疗方法，由于资源密集、所需专业知识程度高且性能常常欠佳，治疗周期的成本往往很高。微流控技术已实现了用于新型辅助生殖设备的具有成本效益的卵子处理程序：卵母细胞被置于具有锯齿状表面的微通道中，以使剪切应力去除不需要的卵丘细胞，而带有扩展单元的微通道则便于芯片中卵母细胞的运输。然而，尽管先前的研究探讨了剪切应力对卵母细胞去卵丘的影响以及微通道齿在优化细胞处理效率方面的作用，但微流控设备中锯齿状表面和扩展单元的配置研究仍然难以捉摸。此外，使用计算流体动力学（CFD）和实际微流控设备进行综合分析仍是一个未被探索的领域。为了填补上述空白，本文研究了具有不同扩展单元的微流控芯片，以描述卵母细胞在受控输入流作用下的行为。所提出的芯片是使用直接雕刻CO激光机在聚甲基丙烯酸甲酯（PMMA）片材上开发和制造的，并在自然通风的实验室烤箱中进行键合，从而制造出用于卵母细胞去卵丘的高效且低成本的微流控芯片。在CFD模拟和实际实验室实验中，以恒定流速对成熟水牛卵母细胞研究了扩展单元的效果，一种具有两行排列的五个扩展单元的芯片实现了98.33%的去卵丘效率、低成本制造（约1美元）和快速制造时间（约20分钟）。
