Evaluation of electrical properties of ex vivo human hepatic tissue with metastatic colorectal cancer

Abstract

Objective: To probe the distribution of electrical properties in tumor-bearing human hepatic tissues with metastatic colorectal cancer. Approach: Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and a non-contact electromagnetic probe were used for distinguishing spatial heterogeneities in fresh, unfixed human hepatic tissues ex vivo from patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC). Main results: Point-wise EIS measurements reported over a frequency range of 100 Hz–1 MHz showed that the interface tissue between visible tumor and normal tissue exhibits an electrically different domain (p < 0.05) from both normal tissue (over 100 Hz–100 kHz) and tumor tissue (over 100 Hz–1 MHz). Observations of the microstructure on tumor-bearing hepatic tissue from hematoxylin and eosin stained images and the equivalent circuit modelling were used to validate the impedance measurements and characterize previously unidentified interfacial domain between normal and tumor tissue. Lastly, in a proof of concept study, a new in-house designed non-contact electromagnetic probe, as opposed to the invasive EIS measurements, was demonstrated for distinguishing tumor tissue from the normal tissue in a hepatic tissue specimen from a patient with metastatic CRC. Significance: EIS measurements, correlated with histological observations, show potential for mapping electrical properties in tumor-bearing human hepatic tissue.

Cross‐flow microfiltration for isolation, selective capture and release of liposarcoma extracellular vesicles

“…The heterogeneity observed in EV size distribution from the serum samples reflects the heterogeneity of this disease (Matthyssens et al., 2015). Tumor heterogeneity is also presented at the tissue level and has been reported for other types of cancer with 40% or higher variation in tumor properties reported between patients (Lochab et al., 2020; Prakash et al., 2015). In order to obtain insights to the heterogeneous size distributions a comparison of the difference between NTA of the same serum sample before and after the device rather than comparison of the sera samples across patients was reported in Figure 6.…”

Irreversible Electroporation: An Emerging Immunomodulatory Therapy on Solid Tumors

“…Currently, IRE is performed mostly for solid tumors such as liver cancer (12), pancreatic cancer (13), and prostate cancer (8) and provides an advantageous palliative treatment for advanced tumors in the vicinity of important ductal structures, such as large blood vessels, the intestines, bile ducts, or the urinary tract. However, the uneven distribution of the PEF, resulting from the heterogeneous electrical properties of tumor tissue (14,15), leads to incomplete ablation and increases the risk of tumor recurrence, which limits the popularity of IRE in clinical practice. Notably, the membrane perforation resulting from IRE can promote the massive release of intracellular concealed tumor antigens, inducing a potential antitumor immune response to kill residual tumor cells after ablation and inhibit the local recurrence of tumors (16).…”

Microfluidic Approaches and Methods Enabling Extracellular Vesicle Isolation for Cancer Diagnostics

“…Moreover, a single tumor biopsy sample With continued advances in cancer research [7][8][9], multiregion genetic analysis of consecutive tumors has shown that each tumor presents diverse, spatially distinct mutations with varied phenotypes within the same tumor [6]. Moreover, a single tumor biopsy sample may be inadequate to develop personalized medicine strategies due to the variations in tumor properties [10,11]. Complexity, diversity, and varied physiological locations for solid tumors [12] lead to additional limitations such as not having enough tumor tissue available for biopsy or not being able to monitor intratumor temporal heterogeneity or metastatic sites [5,13].…”

“…The growing interest in developing microfluidics-enabled technologies for exploiting the advantages offered by liquid biopsies is seen in Figure 1, as reflected by the rapid growth of peer-reviewed publications in this area. A search for the keywords "liquid biopsy" in December 2021 in Elsevier's database Scopus yields 11 Therefore, the purpose of this article is to reach a broad audience of science and engineering researchers developing new microscale flow-based technologies for cancer diagnostics. This review article focuses on microfluidic and nanofluidic devices and the various technological approaches implemented through these devices for liquid biopsies with an emphasis on methods and approaches used for isolation, detection, and analysis of extracellular vesicles (EVs) from biofluids.…”