Measuring the motility and morphology parameters of motile cells is important for revealing their functional characteristics. This paper presents automation techniques that, for the first time, enable automated, non-invasive measurement of motility and morphology parameters of individual sperms. Compared to the status quo of qualitative estimation of single sperm's motility and morphology based on embryologists' empirical experience, the automation techniques provide quantitative data in nearly real time. An adapted joint probabilistic data association filter (JPDAF) was used for multi-sperm tracking and tackled challenges of identifying sperms that intersect or have small spatial distances. Since the standard differential interference contrast (DIC) imaging method has side illumination effect which causes inherent inhomogeneous image intensity and poses difficulties for accurate sperm morphology measurement, we integrated total variation norm into the quadratic cost function method, which together effectively removed inhomogeneous image intensity and retained sperm's subcellular structures after DIC image reconstruction. In order to relocate the same sperm of interest identified under low magnification after switching to high magnification, coordinate transformation was conducted to handle the changes in the field of view caused by magnification switch. Experimental results demonstrated an accuracy of 95.6% in sperm motility measurement and errors <;10% in morphology measurement.

Manipulation of motile cells such as bacteria and sperm is required in both cell biology and clinical applications. For immobilizing a motile sperm, the sperm head and tail positions must be accurately tracked, interference of proximal sperms on the target sperm must be tackled, and the orientation of the sperm must be properly aligned with the manipulation tool in order not to damage the sperm head where DNA is contained. Manual operation of sperm immobilization has stringent skill requirements, and both manual operation and existing robotic sperm immobilization suffer from inconsistent success rates and incapability of manipulating sperms swimming in all directions. This paper presents a robotic system for fully automated tracking, orientation control, and immobilization of motile sperms. Algorithms were developed for robustly tracking the sperm head and estimating the sperm tail positions under interfering conditions. A new visual servo control strategy was developed to enable the robotic system to actively adjust sperm orientation for immobilizing a sperm swimming in any direction. Experimental results from robotic immobilization of 400 sperms confirmed that the robotic system achieved a consistent success rate of 94.5 %, independent of sperm velocity or swimming direction.

Measuring cell motility and morphology is important for revealing their functional characteristics. This paper presents automation techniques that enable automated, non-invasive measurement of motility and morphology parameters of single sperm. Compared to the status quo of qualitative estimation of single sperm's motility and morphology manually, the automation techniques provide quantitative data for embryologists to select a single sperm for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. An adapted joint probabilistic data association filter was used for multi-sperm tracking and tackled challenges of identifying sperms that intersect or have small spatial distances. Since the standard differential interference contrast (DIC) imaging method has side illumination effect which causes inherent inhomogeneous image intensity and poses difficulties for accurate sperm morphology measurement, we integrated total variation norm into the quadratic cost function method, which together effectively removed inhomogeneous image intensity and retained sperm's subcellular structures after DIC image reconstruction. In order to relocate the same sperm of interest identified under low magnification after switching to high magnification, coordinate transformation was conducted to handle the changes in the field of view caused by magnification switch. The sperm's position after magnification switch was accurately predicted by accounting for the sperm's swimming motion during magnification switch. Experimental results demonstrated an accuracy of 95.6% in sperm motility measurement and an error <10% in morphology measurement.