Development And Application Of Dynamic Cell Culture Device Based On Dielectric Elastomer Actuator

As a novel field of mechanical research,cell mechanics and mechanobiology combine mechanical stimulus with biomedical researches,providing scientific and effective methods for better understanding of cellular behavior,lesions and corresponding disease treatments.In terms of selecting the stimulus carrier,the most commonly options are mechanical devices based on motors and pneumatic devices driven by air pumps.However,these methods usually contain too much components,which lead to complex systems and high costs.Compared to the mechanical and pneumatic technologies,the dielectric elastomer actuator(DEA)has been favored by developers for their unique advantages such as optical transparency,fast response,larger deformation,simple structure and convenient integration with optical microscope.Therefore,it is meaningful to develop a cell dynamic mechanical stimulation culture device based on DEA technology.In this paper,a dynamic cell culture device based on DEA is developed.The device is composed of the DEA-based bioreactor and an incubator,it can generate dynamic mechanical stretching and compression stimulus for the cells.The main contents of this paper are listed as follows:(1)The DEA-based bioreactor and its incubator were developed:Employing the combination of pre-stretch and electrode arrays,DEA-based bioreactor was made to generate simultaneous tensile and compression deformations,and digital image correlation(DIC)technology was used to characterize the performance of this bioreactor;Using suitable hole-shape features and 3D-printing technology,an incubator that meets the requirements of bioreactor's high-voltage supply and cellular culture environment was developed.The temperature field of this incubator has been characterized via an infrared thermal imager.(2)Applications of the developed device: The results of static cell culturing and dynamic deformation were recorded and analyzed,proving that this device can actually provide the functions of cell culturing and dynamic mechanical stimulations.Then,the genetic application of A549 cells was preliminarily studied via this device.(3)An auxiliary software for the device was developed: Median filtering was taken to reduce the noise of cellular images,then segmentation based on threshold and information extraction through connected domain labeling were depicted.Finally,a graphical user interface(GUI)was designed,which can combine all the operations and embody some humancomputer interaction logic such as real-time observation and data export.