Development of Dish-Attached Microchip for Autonomous Cell Manipulation System

In this paper, we report on the fabrication of a dish- attached microchip applicable to cell culture dishes and the autonomous control of microvalves based on deep reinforcement learning for manipulation of living cells. We have achieved autonomous position control of microparticles in a two- dimensional plane, and the aim of this study is to apply this technology to living cells. To this end, we first fabricated the contact surfaces of the cell manipulation channels of a microfluidic chip in a structure that can be mounted in a dish used for general cell culture. Deep reinforcement learning is applied to the pumping control of this device in order to acquire autonomous cell manipulation behavior. For efficient learning, a simulator representing the behavior of particles in the manipulation area of the fabricated microfluidic chip was constructed using a neural network, and a behavior decision model was trained in this environment. In this task, rewards are given according to the distance between the particle position and a randomly placed target in the virtual environment in the simulator. As a result, it was observed that the model learnt to manipulate the particles to an arbitrary target position, demonstrating the manipulation of live cells in a real environment by this behavioral decision-making model. This technology is promising as a new platform for the realization of automatic cell array techniques.