Shape recognition of the embryo cell using deformable template for micromanipulation

Abstract

In biology, manipulating a micro-scale object such as chromosome, nucleus or embryo has been an important issue. For instance, skillful manipulation of the embryo cell in the biological experiment requires many years experience with a complex setup. Moreover, such process is usually very slow and requires many hours of intense operations such as trying to find the position of the cell within a petri dish and injecting a pipette to the cell from the best orientation. We have designed a new vision system, by which it finds the region of the mouse embryo cell, and then tracks the nucleus and the polar body within the cell, respectively, using the deformable template algorithm. Performance of the system is compared to the manual case.