Abstract
The automation of liquid handling has become integral in speeding up pharmaceutical development for faster drug development and more affordable treatments. However, the optimal parameters which define the aspirate and dispense procedures vary between liquids and liquid volumes, limiting transfer accuracy and precision. Even state-of-the-art liquid handling devices offer predefined parameters for only a handful of liquids and volumes, resulting in novel parameter sets being defined via a manual, time-consuming process. In this study, we propose an experimental framework for automating the optimisation of liquid class parameters for arbitrary liquids. Within our framework, we propose an optimisation and segmentation algorithm, OptAndSeg, to identify the optimal parameters by automatically grouping volumes into volume ranges and optimising parameters for these volume range subsets. Our method was validated on three live experiments: glycerol, a solution of 25% purified human serum albumin, and human serum. The results showed that OptAndSeg outperformed existing benchmarks for glycerol and human serum. By optimising in non-overlapping volume range segments, we were also able to increase the accuracy and precision of liquid transfer for the 25% purified human serum albumin solution and human serum, achieving relative errors of 5% and 6% or less for volumes as small as 30 μ[jls-end-space/]L. This methodology can be rapidly applied to any arbitrary liquid, therefore enhancing efficiency and throughput of liquid handling in research and development settings.
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
12-1-2025
Volume
156
Publication Title
Journal of Process Control
Publisher
Elsevier
School
Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML) / School of Science
Funders
CSL Behring / Australian Research Council
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Yap, E., Huynh, V., Vong, C., Vogel, P., Louzado, V., Barnes, T., Say, B., Burke, M., Kulić, D., & Aleti, A. (2025). A Bayesian Optimisation with segmentation approach to optimising liquid handling parameters. Journal of Process Control, 156, 103571. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jprocont.2025.103571