Fig. 3

The necessity to develop the robot “Spemann”. We propose how to automatically inoculate probes into chick brains. To achieve accurately embedding the beads in specific regions of the brain, it is essential to develop automatic robotic inoculation systems (Fig. 2b). The following four different industrial systems (a–d) exist: (a) the traditional pharmaceutical vaccine production line (which automatically sterilizes fertilized chick eggs and bores a hole in the eggshell), an automatic precise probe inoculation system combining (b) an integrated-circuit electronic production line and (c) an automatic staging and recording stereomicroscope system (utilized in various biological and medical sciences to record digital information of the x_y_z position of the object), and (d) poultry farming for the massive production of chicks. Combining these industries will enable a mass production line of chicks whose brains contain hundreds of beads (probes) (Fig. 2b). Moreover, (e) computed tomography scanning of chick brains could individually, precisely, and digitally record the x_y_z position of each embedded bead in the brain. Finally, (f) artificial intelligence-mediated deep learning of the inoculation position in the embryo (c, g) and the real position of the beads embedded in the brain (e) guarantees an optimized program that inoculates probes into pre-defined brain regions. Since existing surgical robots have names such as “da Vinci”, the entire system of this putative automatic robot could be called “Spemann”, referring to the developmental biologist who manipulated vertebrate embryos and found “the organizer” (Spemann and Mangold 2001). “Spemann” could meet the academic and industrial demand for brain probes, devices, and electrodes that are controlled via NIR from outside the skull ((h) and Fig. 2A(a))