Electrical impedance tomography integrated with microfluidics: a characterization study for cell/tissue behaviour

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a method which allows a non-invasive and radiation free technique to characterize the dielectric properties of biological tissues and cells. The applicability of EIT in biomedical research has been acquired in different situations such as monitoring of lung ventilation, breast cancer imaging and brain imaging. In this thesis, a step towards a new system is taken to image the cellular growth, based on self-developed EIT sensor. 16 electrodes miniaturized EIT sensor with a customized readout device has been developed. This setup enables a fast and accurate analysis (differentiation) of cells based on impedance measurements. First tests were focused on the confirmation of the setup. Next, yeast cells were used as proof-of-concept to image the cellular growth. The measurements were acquired in function of time and were post-processed into conductivity distribution images using a finite element model in MATLAB. The results have demonstrated that the system was able to image the cellular growth of yeast cells. The mean impedance values of the boundary measurements increase during the cellular growth. Also a clear difference was noticeable in conductivity distribution of the reconstructed images during the growth. This project took the first steps towards new imaging technique for studying cells.Thus, EIT promises to become a valuable tool in multimodal applications for imaging the cell behaviour (cell growth, morphological changes) as response against drugs or biomaterials