Automated Piezo-Assisted Sperm Immobilization

Sperm immobilization is a crucial procedure in clinical cell surgery for infertility treatment. Current immobilization is implemented by tapping the sperm tail with a glass micropipette, but its effectiveness is restricted by sperm orientation and ineffective membrane ablation. Ineffective ablation leads to limited release of oocyte activating factors and lowers fertilization rate; and sperm swim in small angles relative to the micropipette tip cannot be tapped due to the risk of damaging the sperm’s genetic materials contained in the sperm head. This paper reports automated piezo-assisted sperm immobilization with enhanced efficacy of cell membrane ablation and sperm orientation control. The designed piezo drill consists of two orthogonal vibration modules to generate controlled micropipette vibration along axial and lateral axes. Through stiffness modeling, the flexure joints guide the motion of the central beam of each vibration module. To achieve sperm orientation control, whirl flow is induced by both axial and lateral vibration of the micropipette tip. To immobilize sperm, only micropipette’s axial vibration is generated to prevent lateral vibration from damaging sperm head. A visual servoing scheme is developed by decoupling sperm wiggling from positioning error for immobilization. Experimental results showed that sperm orientation control by the piezo drill achieved an error of 1.4° and a time cost of 2.5 s. Visual servoing with sperm wiggling decoupling achieved a positioning error of
$1.7~\mu \text{m}$
. Furthermore, the piezo-assisted sperm immobilization technique led to effective membrane ablation. With membrane-impermeable stains, it took 5.6 s for the immobilized sperm to be stained after piezo-assisted immobilization, significantly less than 49.2 s by conventional micropipette tapping. Note to Practitioners—This work tackled the challenge of ineffective membrane ablation and orientation limit in clinical cell surgeries. Conventional manual immobilization suffers from low membrane ablation efficacy, which leads to limited release of oocyte activating factors and lowers fertilization rate. Moreover, sperm swim in small angles relative to the micropipette tip cannot be tapped due to the risk of damaging the sperm’s genetic materials contained in the sperm head. In this paper, we propose automation techniques for effective membrane ablation and orientation control of sperm. A clinically compatible piezo drill is developed to generate controllable micropipette motion along both axial and lateral directions. The whirl flow generated by micropipette vibration is employed to rotate sperm, which greatly increased the number of available sperm for immobilization. A visual servoing controller is developed to keep the sperm at the center of field of view for immobilization by decoupling sperm wiggling from positioning error. The developed methods can be generalized to the manipulation of other types of cells. The piezo drill can be used for effective membrane ablation of oocyte, embryo, yeast cell and so on. The orientation control strategy leveraging piezo-induced whirl flow is applicable to non-contact rotation of a variety of microorganism.