A quantitative cell modeling and wound-healing analysis based on the Electric Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing (ECIS) method

Abstract

In this paper, a quantitative modeling and wound-healing analysis of fibroblast and human keratinocyte cells is presented. Our study was conducted using a continuous cellular impedance monitoring technique, dubbed Electric Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing (ECIS). In fact, we have constructed a mathematical model for quantitatively analyzing the cultured cell growth using the time series data directly derived by ECIS in a previous work. In this study, the applicability of our model into the keratinocyte cell growth modeling analysis was assessed first. In addition, an electrical "wound-healing" assay was used as a means to evaluate the healing process of keratinocyte cells at a variety of pressures. Two innovative and new-defined indicators, dubbed cell power and cell electroactivity, respectively, were developed for quantitatively characterizing the biophysical behavior of cells. We then employed the wavelet transform method to perform a multi-scale analysis so the cell power and cell electroactivity across multiple observational time scales may be captured. Numerical results indicated that our model can well fit the data measured from the keratinocyte cell culture for cell growth modeling analysis. Also, the results produced by our quantitative analysis showed that the wound healing process was the fastest at the negative pressure of 125mmHg, which consistently agreed with the qualitative analysis results reported in previous works.

Keywords: Electric Cell-substrate Impedance Sensing (ECIS); Modeling; Negative pressure; Wound healing.