Impedance-optical Dual-modal Sensor and Image Reconstruction for Cell Spheroids Imaging

The low spatial resolution of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is one of the limiting factors to perform quantitative analysis of the properties and behaviors of imaging targets in biomedical applications. In this work, we present an impedance-optical dual-modal sensor for 3D cell culture imaging and propose a corresponding EIT image reconstruction framework named Image-guide Framework (IGF) for high-resolution cell culture imaging. IGF extracts and incorporates the structural information of imaging objects from the auxiliary optical imaging modality into EIT image reconstruction through group sparsity regularization. We validate the performance of the dual-modal sensor and IGF via MCF-7 cell spheroids phantom experiments. The results suggest the combination of the proposed sensor and IGF could lead to significantly improved image quality. This implies the potential of a new structure-function joint imaging technique for tissue engineering.