Design and Image Reconstruction of a Miniature Electrical Impedance Tomography Sensor for 3D Cell Culture Imaging

摘要

Objective: Real-time quantitative imaging is becoming highly desirable to study nondestructively the biological behavior of three dimensional cell culture systems. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of quantitative imaging/monitoring of 3D cell culture processes via Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), which is capable of generating conductivity images in a non-destructive manner with high temporal resolution. Methods: To this end, a miniature EIT sensor amenable to standard cell culture format is designed. Furthermore, a 3D forward model for the sensor is developed and its sensitivity characteristic is analyzed. Two regularization algorithms, 3D Laplacian regularization and 3D Total Variation, are proposed to perform 3D image reconstruction. To evaluate the designed sensor and the proposed reconstruction methods, phantom simulations and experiments on a rice grain and a high density cancer cell pellet are carried out. Conclusion: Promising results have been attained in both simulation study and experiments, which demonstrate the feasibility of using the designed miniature EIT sensor and proposed image reconstruction methods to visualize three dimensional cell cultures such as spheroids or artificial tissues and organs. Significance: The established work would expedite real-time quantitative imaging of 3D cell culture for assessment of cellular dynamics.