Automatic Vision Guided Small Cell Injection: Feature Detection, Positioning, Penetration and Injection

Vision guided automatic cell injection system has become increasingly important in the past ten years. The existing cell injection systems mainly deal with large cells with size bigger than 40 micrometers. However, when dealing with small cells, the internal and external disturbances presented in the system may affect the success rate of injections significantly. In this paper, the system setup of vision guided cell injection system is presented. Feature tracking, micropipette positioning, cell membrane penetration and biological material injection processes for small cell with size around 20 micrometers are discussed. Sum of square difference (SSD) tracking algorithm based on 2 dimensional (2D)-to-2D feature correspondences is used to handle disturbances. A modified proportional position controller is adopted to control the micropipette. The importance of cell membrane penetration modeling is emphasized.