Automated Denudation of Oocytes

Overview

Journal Micromachines (Basel)

Publisher MDPI

Date 2022 Aug 26

PMID 36014223

Authors

Rongan Zhai

Guanqiao Shan

Changsheng Dai

Miao Hao

Junhui Zhu

Changhai Ru

Yu Sun

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

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.

Citing Articles

Editorial for the Special Issue on Fundamentals and Applications of Micro/Nanorobotics.

Wei C, Zhang Z, Wang X, Lu H, Yu J Micromachines (Basel). 2024; 15(11).

PMID: 39597115 PMC: 11596912. DOI: 10.3390/mi15111303.

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