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

A 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, modeled, and characterized. In addition, an efficient 3-D image reconstruction method based on 3-D isotropic total variation and l 1 joint regularization was proposed. The numerical simulation on scaffold phantoms and the experimental study on time-varying distribution of MCF-7 cancer cell suspension within the scaffold were performed. Both the 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.