Evaluating Cell Viability Heterogeneity Based on Information Fusion of
Multiple Adhesion Strengths
Abstract
Cell viability evaluation is significantly meaningful for cellular
assays. Some cells with weak viability are easily killed in the
detection of anti-cancer drugs, while others with strong viability
survive and proliferate, ultimately leading to the treatment failure or
the inaccuracy of biological assays. Accurately evaluating cell
viability heterogeneity still remains difficult. This paper proposed a
multi-physical property information fusion method for evaluating cell
viability heterogeneity based on multiple linear regression (MLR) on a
single-channel integrated microfluidic chip. In this method, adhesion
strengths τN, that are defined as the magnitude of shear stress needed
to detach (100-N) % of cell population, were extracted as the
independent variables of MLR model by calculating the linear fitting of
the impedance-response curves for shear stress (cell detachment assay).
Besides, by calculating the non-linear fitting of the drug dose-response
curves for cancer cells (IC50 assay), the half-maximal inhibitory
concentration (IC50) was extracted as the dependent variables of MLR
model. The results show that the mean relative error of our fusion
method reduces by 17.87% and 59.66% compared with the single-parameter
method and the cell counting method. Moreover, through the theoretical
analysis of the drug resistance heterogeneity model, it proved that
there is a qualitative relationship between the cell adhesion strength
and cell viability heterogeneity, which provides a theoretical basis for
our fusion method.