Monitoring adipose-derived stem cells within 3D carrier by combined dielectric spectroscopy and spectral domain optical coherence topography

Monitoring non-invasively the cellular events in three dimensional carriers is a major challenge for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine that prevents time-lapsed studies over large population of sample. The potential of optical coherence tomography has been demonstrated to assess tissue formation within porous matrices. In this study we explore the combination of dielectric spectroscopy (DS) and spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SDOCT) to quality assess ADSCs loaded in three dimensional carriers. A SDOCT (930nm, FWHM 90nm) was combined to an open ended coaxial probe connected to material analyser, and broadband measurements between 20MHz and 1GHz were synchronized with Labview. Both ADSCs maintained in undifferentiated state within 3D carrier and induced towards osteoblasts were monitored with this multimodality technique and their DS spectra were acquired at high cell concentration simultaneously to 3D imaging. This multimodality technique will be instrumental to assess non-invasively cell loaded carriers for cell therapy.