A Team of researchers led by the University of California, San Diego, and Stanford University has discovered a noninvasive approach for monitoring electrical activity inside cardiac muscle cells from the outside, without physically penetrating the cells.
The method is based on capturing electrical signals from outside the cells and using AI to reconstruct the signals within the cells with high precision.
The electrical signals inside heart muscle cells provide insights into how the heart functions, how its cells communicate and how they respond to drugs. However capturing these signals typically involves puncturing the cells with tiny electrodes, which can damage them and make large-scale testing complicated.
Now, researchers have found a way to peer inside the cells without actually going in.
The key lies in extracting the relationship between the signals inside the cells (intracellular signals) and those recorded on their surface (extracellular signals). “We discovered that extracellular signals hold the information we need to unlock the intracellular features that we’re interested in,” said Zeinab Jahed, a professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and NanoEngineering at UC San Diego, who is one of the study’s senior authors. Keivan Rahmani, a nanoengineering Ph D student in Jahed’s lab, is the first author of the study.
While extracellular signals can be captured with swless invasive methods, they do not provide much detail about the cell’s electrical activity. “It is like listening to a conversation through a wall-you can detect that communication is happening, but you miss the specific details,” explained Jahed. “In contrast, intracellular signals offer the details, making you feel like you are sitting inside the room hearing every word clearly, but they can only be captured by invasive and more technically challenging methods.” Using AI, Jahed, Rahmani and colleagues developed a method to correlate extracellular signals with specific intracellular signals.
To develop the new method, the team first engineered an array of nanoscale, needle-shaped electrodes. These electrodes, each up to 200 times smaller than a single heart muscle cell, are made of silica-coated with platinum. Heart muscle cells, derived from stem cells, were grown and then placed on the electrode array.
SOURCE: ANI
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