Abstract
In tissue engineering, it is important to manipulate cells quickly, so that we can construct 3D cell structure including blood pipe before it results in necrosis. In this paper, we newly propose the geometrically-constrained cell manipulation where the cell manipulation is achieved in 1D micro channel instead of 3D free space. The key idea is that cell motion with originally six degrees of freedom (d.o.f) in free space is constrained to one d.o.f by pushing cell into a channel. This manipulation scheme contributes to drastically reducing the manipulation time. Focusing on the positioning of cell in the micro channel, we confirmed that the position control is stable due to enough viscous force between cell and wall of the channel. The experimental system is precisely explained together with the manipulation algorithm. By using the developed system, we succeeded in cell positioning with 1[μm] resolution in average and with the maximum speed of 36.4[&mu ;m/s], by utilizing a high speed vision system, piezoelectric actuator (PZT), and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chip including the micro channel whose diameter is slightly less than the cell to be handled.
