Elastic Properties Exploration of In Vitro Cultured Microscopic Cells based on Haptic Sensing

Abstract – This paper deals with the design of a micro-force sens-ing device for biomechanical characterization of biological samples. This device combines (SPM) techniques and advanced robotics ap-proaches and allows to carry out in vitro prolonged observations as well as biomechanical characterization experiments. Elastic prop-erties of biological samples are reflected to the macroscale during the mechanical characterization process by means of a haptic sens-ing device. Non-linear elasticity theory formalism is used in order to achieve realistic elastic rendering. Mechanical characterization ex-periments are conducted on human tumoral Epithilial Hella cells in order to demonstrate the efficiency and viability of the proposed sys-tem