Electrical Impedance Tomography for Biological Cell Sensing with Microfluidic Device

doi:10.3901/JME.2019.02.001

Abstract

Abstract: A micro electrical impedance tomography (μEIT) system is developed to visualize cells concentration distribution in microchannel flow. Due to the complexity of electrical properties of the μEIT system in micro-scale measurement, simulation and experiments are conducted to find the optimal conditions of the image reconstruction process. In the simulation, three image reconstruction algorithms which are generalized vector sampled pattern matching (GVSPM), iterative tikhonov regularization (TK) and projected landweber iteration (PLW) are estimated, GVSPM is found to be the optimal algorithm for image reconstruction in the present study due to its higher image correlation I_C=0.84 and lower image error I_E=0.43. In the experiment, yeast cells and purified water are employed as two-phase flow to measure the cells sedimentation in the microchannel at a range of frequencies with GVSPM, TK and PLW, respectively. The optimal frequency for the μEIT system is found as f=1 MHz due to its higher measurement sensitivity. GVSPM is found as the optimal image reconstruction algorithm because of its low voltage error U_E=0.582 and simpler image reconstruction without regularization factor. Finally, images of cells sedimentation are reconstructed with GVSPM in three cross-sections in microchannel flow at f=1 MHz. The reconstructed images show that concentration of cells sedimentation from the upstream Z1 to downstream z5 is decreased gradually along the flow direction in the microchannel.

Key words: cell electrical properties, cell sedimentation, image reconstruction algorithm, potential drop, two-phase flow

CLC Number:

TH772

YAO Jiafeng, LIU Xiayi, XU Zifei, ZHAO Tong, CHEN Bai, WU Hongtao. Electrical Impedance Tomography for Biological Cell Sensing with Microfluidic Device[J]. Journal of Mechanical Engineering, 2019, 55(2): 1-9.

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