Imaging Cell-drug Response in 3D Scaffolds by Electrical Impedance Tomograpy

Abstract: Real-time quantitative imaging becomes increasingly desirable to study the cell behaviour in 3D in vitro experiments, but it could not be carried out by most of the traditional measurement methods. In this study, electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is used to monitor the real-time cell-drug response in a bioscaffold. MCF-7 breast cancer cells cultured in 3D bioscaffolds were placed into a miniature sensor and exposed to lysis buffer Triton X-100 to simulate drug effect on cancer cells. The images of cell response were reconstructed by measurement data with a structure based algorithm. The results show that the changes of cell conductivity caused by the drug effect could be effectively monitored by EIT in real-time. With the help of structure based image reconstruction algorithm, the background noise in the reconstructed image is eliminated and the conductivity change in the area of interest is highlighted. These results indicate that EIT has potential to be a novel technique for the drug evaluation by quantitative analysis of 3D cell culture.

Biography: Hancong Wu is a PhD student with the Agile Tomography Group, University of Edinburgh. He received his BEng Hons degree both in Electronics and Electrical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh and in Electronic and Information Engineering at South China University of Technology in 2015. His current research interest is focused on multi-frequency Electrical Impedance Tomography for biomedical and biological imaging.