PiRT-IFC: Physics-informed real-time impedance flow cytometry for the characterization of cellular intrinsic electrical properties

Abstract

Real-time transformation was important for the practical implementation of impedance flow cytometry. The major obstacle was the time-consuming step of translating raw data to cellular intrinsic electrical properties (e.g., specific membrane capacitance Csm and cytoplasm conductivity σcyto). Although optimization strategies such as neural network-aided strategies were recently reported to provide an impressive boost to the translation process, simultaneously achieving high speed, accuracy, and generalization capability is still challenging. To this end, we proposed a fast parallel physical fitting solver that could characterize single cells’ Csm and σcyto within 0.62 ms/cell without any data preacquisition or pretraining requirements. We achieved the 27000-fold acceleration without loss of accuracy compared with the traditional solver. Based on the solver, we implemented physics-informed real-time impedance flow cytometry (piRT-IFC), which was able to characterize up to 100,902 cells’ Csm and σcyto within 50 min in a real-time manner. Compared to the fully connected neural network (FCNN) predictor, the proposed real-time solver showed comparable processing speed but higher accuracy. Furthermore, we used a neutrophil degranulation cell model to represent tasks to test unfamiliar samples without data for pretraining. After being treated with cytochalasin B and N-Formyl-Met-Leu-Phe, HL-60 cells underwent dynamic degranulation processes, and we characterized cell’s Csm and σcyto using piRT-IFC. Compared to the results from our solver, accuracy loss was observed in the results predicted by the FCNN, revealing the advantages of high speed, accuracy, and generalizability of the proposed piRT-IFC.