New Developments Towards Automated Blastocyst Microinjections

This paper presents results related to our latest semi-automated blastocyst microinjection system. Here, the improvements made to the microinjection system are described and evaluated. First, after replacing the original piezo-electric kinematic stage by a DC motor-based robot manipulator, experimentation showed that the speed and the precise motion control of pipettes were improved. Second, by introducing an X-Y stage into the system, to manipulate the Petri dish around the microscope´s field of view, multiple microinjection speed was improved. Third, by using SSD template matching to track the injection pipette, rather than the cross-correlation template matching algorithm used in the original system, improvements were made to pipette localization. Under human control, this new semi-automated system gives improved microinjection performance metrics compared to previously obtained results. The system is also providing implicit human knowledge of the microinjection process via the human-control interface. It is the encoding of this knowledge that will lead to the first fully automated system. The semi-automated microinjection system is being tested and evaluated in the AMC at UNC-Chapel Hill.