Development of a Stereo-Vision Based High-Throughput Robotic System for Mouse Tail Vein Injection

Abstract

In this paper, we present a robotic device for mouse tail vein injection. We propose a mouse holding mechanism to realize vein injection without anesthetizing the mouse, which consists of a tourniquet, vacuum port, and adaptive tail-end fixture. The position of the target vein in 3D space is reconstructed from a high-resolution stereo vision. The vein is detected by a simple but robust vein line detector. Thanks to the proposed two-staged calibration process, the total time for the injection process is limited to 1.5 minutes, despite that the position of needle and tail vein varies for each trial. We performed an injection experiment targeting 40 mice and succeeded to inject saline to 37 of them, resulting 92.5% success ratio.