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. To this end, a planar miniature EIT sensor amenable to standard cell culture format is designed and a 3D forward model for the sensor is developed for 3D imaging. Furthermore, a novel 3D-Laplacian and sparsity joint regularization algorithm is proposed for enhanced 3D image reconstruction. Simulation phantoms with spheres at various vertical and horizontal positions were imaged for 3D performance evaluation. In addition, experiments on human breast cancer cell spheroid and a triangular breast cancer cell pellet were carried out for experimental verification. The results have shown that stable measurement on high conductive cell culture medium and significant improvement of image quality based on the proposed regularization method are achieved. It demonstrates the feasibility of using the miniature EIT sensor and 3D image reconstruction algorithm to visualize 3D cell cultures such as spheroids or artificial tissues and organs. The established work would expedite real-time quantitative imaging of 3D cell culture for assessment of cellular dynamics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.