Visual Servoed Zebrafish Larva Heart Microinjection System

As a typical vertebrate model animal, the zebrafish has become a popular organism. For studying a specific disease mechanism, an efficient zebrafish microinjection technology is required. Compared with widely researched embryo injection technology, zebrafish larva injection has not been developed intensively. In particular, zebrafish larva heart injection is generally operated manually, which is laborious and time consuming. In this paper, we present a visual servo system of zebrafish larva heart microinjection, capable of visually determining larva heart position and controlling the microactuators. The larva's body is first rotated to be perpendicular to holding pipette; then, a robust visual detection algorithm against different larva gestures is presented to obtain its heart position in the horizontal plane. A rolling model is further constructed based on a database of larva body slice figures to estimate the heart height. Experimental results show that a satisfied success and survival rate can be obtained by presented methods, which is comparable to manual operation.