Out-of-Plane Rotation Control of Biological Cells with a Robot-Tweezers Manipulation System for Orientation-Based Cell Surgery

In many cell surgery applications, cell must be oriented properly such that the microsurgery tool can access the target components with minimum damage to the cell. In this paper, a scheme for out of image plane orientation control of suspended biological cells using robotic controlled optical tweezers is presented for orientation-based cell surgery. Based on our previous work on planar cell rotation using optical tweezers, the dynamic model of cell out-of-plane orientation control is formulated by using the T-matrix approach. Vision-based algorithms are developed to extract the cell out of image plane orientation angles, based on 2-D image slices obtained under an optical microscope. A robust feedback controller is then proposed to achieve cell out-of-plane rotation. Experiments of automated out of image plane rotational control for cell nucleus extraction surgery are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This approach advances robot-aided single cell manipulation and produces impactful benefits to cell surgery applications such as nucleus transplantation and organelle biopsy in precision medicine.