Ultrasound based noninvasive real-time cell proliferation process monitoring.

ABSTRACT

The proliferation process's efficiency is related to the number of cells grown in culture and the maximum efficiency obtained at the stationary phase. Since the culture's growth speed is different for various cells and even for subgroups of the same cells, it is essential to monitor the process properly to obtain maximum efficiency. In this work, ultrasonic velocity measurement was performed noninvasively for wireless real-time monitoring of the suspension cell culture using a single integrated device to get maximum efficiency from the process by determining the phases. Using the advantage of the developed device's portability and wireless connectivity, the cells are monitored in the incubator without interfering with the actual process. Therefore, a real-time highly sampled growth curve is obtained, which was not possible to obtain with the currently used methods or the offline methods that are based on taking samples from the culture invasively. Filtering and curve fitting methods are also applied to the data to obtain a clean growth curve. The method developed as a result of this study ensures that the suspension cell culture was monitored most conveniently in the actual growth medium in real-time and noninvasively.