Analysis of Different Computational Techniques for Calculating the Polarizability Tensors of Stem Cells with Realistic Three-Dimensional Morphologies

Published

June 21, 2019

Author(s)

Edward Garboczi, Jack Douglas, Beatriz Pazmino, Ahmed M. Hassan, Somen Baidya

Abstract

Recent advances in synthetic biomaterial microenvironment design has enabled researchers to mimic the natural in vivo environment of the cell and, therefore, quantify the effect of the environment on the morphologies of stem cells. Recently, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has developed a database of three-dimensional (3D) stem cell shapes grown in ten different scaffolds. The primary goal of this work was to study the polarizability of these recently reported stem cell morphologies to quantify the effect of the environment on the electric properties of these cells. There are no closed form expressions for the polarizability of these stem cells due to their complex and asymmetric 3D shapes. Therefore, in this work we present three independent computational solvers for calculating the polarizability tensors of stem cells and we outline the advantages and limitations of each technique. We also show excellent agreement between the three techniques validating the accuracy of our calculations. These solvers allowed us to investigate different meshing resolutions for each stem cell morphology. After validating our results, we developed a fast and accurate Padé approximate formulation to calculate the polarizability tensors of stem cells for any contrast value between their dielectric permittivity and the dielectric permittivity of their environment. Using our computational results, we performed statistical analysis to identify which environment generates cells with similar electric properties. The computational techniques and the results reported herein can be used as a standard for calculating the electric properties of similar biological structures with complex 3D morphologies and shed light on the electric response of stem cells in a wide range of applications such as dielectrophoresis and electroporation.

Citation

Journal of Applied Physics

Volume

66

Issue

7

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2018.2876145

Local Download

Keywords

stem cells, computational, morphology, COMSOL, SCUFF-EM, NIST, polarizability

Citation

Garboczi, E. , Douglas, J. , Pazmino, B. , Hassan, A. and Baidya, S. (2019), Analysis of Different Computational Techniques for Calculating the Polarizability Tensors of Stem Cells with Realistic Three-Dimensional Morphologies, Journal of Applied Physics, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2018.2876145, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=925759 (Accessed October 2, 2025)