Robotic Precisely Oocyte Blind Enucleation Method

Abstract

Oocyte enucleation is a critical procedure for somatic cell nuclear transfer. Yet, the main steps of oocyte enucleation are still manually operated, which presents several drawbacks such as low precision, high repetition error, and long training time for operators. For improving the operation efficiency and success rate, a robotic precise oocyte blind enucleation method is presented in this paper. The proposed method involves the following key techniques: oocyte translation control, oocyte immobilization and penetration control, and enucleation volume control based on the adaptive slide mode. Compared with the manual blind enucleation method, the proposed robotic blind enucleation method reduced the operation time by 44.5% (manual method: 62 s vs. proposed method: 34.4 s), increased the accuracy of enucleation by 83.1% (manual method: 30.7 vs. proposed method: 5.2), increased the success rate from 80% to 93.3%, and increased the cleavage rate from 41.7% to 63.3%.

Keywords

• robotic blind enucleation
• robotic cell manipulation
• adaptive slide mode controls