Oocyte positional recognition for automatic manipulation in ICSI

Polar body position detection is a necessary process in the automation of micromanipulation systems specifically used in intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) applications. The polar body is an intracellular structure, which accommodates the chromosomes, and the injection must not only avoid this structure but be at the furthest point away from it. This paper aims to develop a vision recognition system for the recognition of the oocyte and its polar body in order to be used to inform the automated injection mechanism to avoid the polar body. The novelty of the paper is its capability to determine the position and orientation of the oocyte and its polar body. The gradient-weighted Hough transform method was employed for the detection of the location of the oocyte and its polar body. Moreover, a new elliptical fitting method was employed for size measurement of the polar bodies and oocytes for the allowance of morphological variance of the oocytes and their polar bodies. The proposed algorithm has been designed to be adaptable with typical commercial inverted microscopes with different criteria. The successful experimental results for this algorithm produce maximum errors of 5% for detection and 10% for reporting respectively.