Development of Micro-Grippers for Tissue and Cell Manipulation with Direct Morphological Comparison

Micromachines

Rossana Cecchi²  Matteo Verotti⁴  Roberto Capata⁴  Alden Dochshanov⁴  Giovanni Battista Broggiato⁴  Rocco Crescenzi⁷  Marco Balucani⁷  Stefano Natali⁵  Giovanna Razzano³  Franco Lucchese¹  Alvise Bagolini⁶  Pierluigi Bellutti⁶  Enrico Sciubba⁴  Nicola P. Belfiore⁴ 

[1] Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Via degli Apuli, 1-00185 Roma, Italy;Section of Forensic Medicine of the Department of Histological, Forensic & Orthopedic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5-00185 Roma, Italy;Department of Law, Philosophy and Economic Studies, Sapienza University of Rome, Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5-00185 Roma, Italy;Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Eudossiana, 18-00184 Roma, Italy;Department of Chemical Engineering Materials Environment, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Eudossiana, 18-00184 Roma, Italy;Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Micro Nano Facility (MNF), Via S. Croce, 77-38122 Trento, Italy;Department of Information Engineering, Electronic and Telecommunications, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Eudossiana, 18-00184 Roma, Italy;

关键词: MEMS;    cell manipulation;    tissue manipulation;    microgripper;   

DOI  :  10.3390/mi6111451

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Although tissue and cell manipulation nowadays is a common task in biomedical analysis, there are still many different ways to accomplish it, most of which are still not sufficiently general, inexpensive, accurate, efficient or effective. Several problems arise both for in vivo or in vitro analysis, such as the maximum overall size of the device and the gripper jaws (like in minimally-invasive open biopsy) or very limited manipulating capability, degrees of freedom or dexterity (like in tissues or cell-handling operations). This paper presents a new approach to tissue and cell manipulation, which employs a conceptually new conjugate surfaces flexure hinge (CSFH) silicon MEMS-based technology micro-gripper that solves most of the above-mentioned problems. The article describes all of the phases of the development, including topology conception, structural design, simulation, construction, actuation testing and in vitro observation. The latter phase deals with the assessment of the function capability, which consists of taking a series of in vitro images by optical microscopy. They offer a direct morphological comparison between the gripper and a variety of tissues.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.