High-accuracy gastric cancer cell viability evaluation based on multi-impedance spectrum characteristics

The increasing attention to precision medicine is widely paid to greatly rise the cure rate of cancer. Improving the stability and accuracy of cancer cell viability evaluation is one of the keys for precision medicine, as excess dosage of anti-cancer drugs not only kills the cancer cells, but also does harm to normal cells. Electrochemical impedance sensing (EIS) method is well known as a label-free, non-invasive approach for real-time, online monitoring of cell viability. However, the existing EIS methods using single-frequency impedances cannot reflect the comprehensive information of cellular impedance spectroscopy (CIS), ultimately leading to a poor stability and low accuracy of cancer cell viability evaluation. In this paper, we proposed a multi-frequency approach for improving the stability and accuracy of cancer cell viability evaluation based on multi-physical properties of CIS, including cell adhesion state and cell membrane capacitance. The results show that the mean relative error of multi-frequency method is reduced by 50% compared with single-frequency method, while the maximum relative error of the former is 7∼fold smaller than that of the latter. The accuracy of cancer cell viability evaluation is up to 99.6%.