P –171 Automated oocyte and zygote denudation using a novel microfluidic device supervised by a computer vision algorithm

This study was conducted during 2020 – 2021.Participants/materials, setting, methodsWe developed a customized microfluidic biochip that exerts a particular fluid motion while avoiding egg entrapment within microfluidic channels. The denudation efficacy was established by subjectively scoring images of bovine oocytes after generating a continuous “Push& Pull ” fluid motion inside the biochip wells. A Computer Vision model was developed in parallel in order to optically assess denudation completion. The model used was a Pytorch implementation of Faster-RCNN with ImageNet pretrained weightsMain results and the role of chance96 bovine COCs were microfuidically handled post insemination achieving complete (56/96) or partial (40/96) removal of the cumulus cells on day 1, while for day 3 double denudation group, 89/96 (92.7%) were completely denuded while the rest remained partially denuded. In comparison, 80/80 (100%) of manually denuded cow COCs, achieved complete denudation (50% post-insemination group and 50% pre-insemination group). In addition, 48/64 (75%) cow COCs treated pre-insemination were partially denuded, enough to carry out ICSI after 5 –10 min of treatment. The results here obtained indicate that media needs to flow through the device at a rate that can generate enough shear to strip off the cumulus-corona cells while avoiding emptying of the reservoirs containing the fertilization or culture medium. The shear stress of our de sign was calculated to be ...
Source: Human Reproduction - Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: research