Scaffold-Based 3-D Cell Culture Imaging Using a Miniature Electrical Impedance Tomography Sensor

Abstract

3-D Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is an emerging technique for real-time and non-destructive 3-D cell culture imaging. This paper presents a pioneering study of scaffold-based 3-D cell culture imaging using a miniature planar EIT sensor. A 17-electrode miniature-planar EIT sensor equipped with a regular-shape 3-D printed scaffold was manufactured, modelled and characterized. In addition, an efficient 3-D image reconstruction method based on 3-D isotropic Total Variation and l1 joint regularization were proposed. Numerical simulation on scaffold phantoms and experimental study on time-varying distribution of MCF-7 cancer cell suspension within the scaffold were performed. Both simulation and experiment results suggest that using the miniature EIT sensor and the developed 3-D image reconstruction algorithms are able to achieve high quality, non-destructive scaffold-based 3-D cell culture imaging.

Exploring the Potential of Electrical Impedance Tomography for Tissue Engineering Applications

“…To overcome the ill-posedness, the objective function, Equation (5), is constrained with an additional regularization function. In this study, the isotropic TV and l1 joint regularization [ 30 ] were applied: where is the TV of the reconstructed image [ 31 ] and is the l1 penalty term. and are the regularization parameters for the TV regularization and the l1 regularization, respectively.…”

Hybrid Learning-Based Cell Aggregate Imaging With Miniature Electrical Impedance Tomography

“…Recently, EIT has exhibited great potential in the field of tissue engineering. Emerging applications include cell culture imaging [8], [9], cell-drug response imaging [10], cell growth and viability assessment [11], monitoring of single cell mitosis [12], and tissue electroporation imaging [13]. Among these applications, cell imaging with EIT has been particularly challenging in solving the EIT-image-reconstruction problem.…”

“…Some prevailing regularization methods include Tikhonov regularization [14], Total Variation (TV) regularization [15], sparsity (or l 1 ) regularization [16], [17] and its variety [18], etc. Particularly, 3-D TV and l 1 joint regularization was previously proposed by the authors for 3-D cell culture imaging [9]. Recently, novel image reconstruction approaches from statistical perspectives have stimulated new insights to solve this problem.…”

Image reconstruction for electrical impedance tomography based on spatial invariant feature maps and convolutional neural network

“…E LECTRICAL impedance tomography (EIT) is one kind of imaging modality with the properties of noninvasiveness, low cost and easy to deploy, which allows it to be applied in a wide range of scenarios, such as industrial process monitoring [1], [2], cell culture observation [3], etc. The main algorithmic problem in EIT is conductivity distribution reconstruction based on differential voltage measurements through solving an inverse problem [4].…”