Abstract
In recent years, in addition to congenital reasons, the bad habits of modern life become more common and complex. The incidence of infertility comes to about 15%, which means that every 1 out of 7 couples has the problem of infertility. In vitro fertilization (IVF), also named test tube baby, is the most common way of treating infertility. Unfortunately, in vitro artificial insemination requires complicated manual operation. The statistic results indicate that the survival rate of test tube baby is only 27.4%. Improving the quality of the embryo becomes a major research topic now. In this research, many microfluidics technologies, including automatic positioning, dynamic perfusion, in vitro bionic uterine culture environment, are integrated into this uterine chip. First, the embryos were captured via the design of the specific microfluidic structure. Then the physical stimulation and the rotation induced by the shear force were applied to mimic the environment of the fallopian tube. The rotation of embryos on chip were achieved with the translational speed of 500μm/min under the pump velocity control. The dynamic perfusion was also applied to flush the metabolic waste away and provide the required nutrition for cell culture. Our chip has the potential feature targeting for greatly reducing the impact of unnecessary human manipulation during IVF.