Imaging cell-drug response in 3D bioscaffolds by electrical impedance tomography

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. 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.