Micromanipulation robot system for electrophysiology experiments on oocyte

Abstract

This paper presented the three-dimensional oocyte manipulation system for the two-electrode voltage clamp (TEVC) experiment. We focus on contact and penetration detection during the capillary insertion process into oocytes. Instead of the conventional methods such as contact detection using backward difference information of images and penetration detection using QCR force sensor, we propose a method using tracking of feature points in the cell region by Optical Flow. By focusing on the displacement of each feature point in the X-direction (capillary insertion direction), we found that signals can be obtained at the timing of contact or penetration. We also demonstrated that the proposed method is superior to the QCR force sensor in terms of contact detection, low-noise signal, and multi-point information.