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CHAPTER 5

Bioimpedance methods

5.1 Introduction
The increase in the prevalence of chronic diseases has driven the interest in using new tech-
nological advances (communication technologies, consumer electronics, wearable systems,
etc.) to enhance the quality and affordability of the healthcare systems (Majumder et al.,
2019; Punj and Kumar, 2019), either in a clinical environment or domestic conditions
(Kyle et al., 2004). With respect to this, bioimpedance techniques have gained an important
role because they may provide insights about the internal processes of the body and the
living matter in a noninvasive manner (Grimnes and Martinsen, 2008; Naranjo-Hernández
et al., 2019; Piuzzi et al., 2019; Rapin et al., 2019). The impedance of a biological medium
(cell culture, tissue, body, and also inorganic media) depends on the frequency of the elec-
tric signal (in general, a low amplitude, alternating current) used to measure it, and this
behavior may provide insights about the physiology and pathology of cells and tissues.
Bioimpedance techniques are used in the body composition analysis (BIA), to eval-
uate the hydration and nutritional status in many clinical areas, as reviewed by Kyle
et al. (2004): obstetrics, critical care, postoperative monitoring, pregnancy, lactation,
nutrition, gastroenterology, obesity, chronic inflammation, skin water content, blood
volume, ablation monitoring, tissue ischemia, viability of transplanted organs monitor-
ing, sleep apnea detection (Ahmad et al., 2013), chronic kidney diseases management
(López-Gómez, 2011), or sports science (Di Vincenzo et al., 2019).
Clinical laboratory tools including lab-on-chip devices (Kassanos et al., 2014)utilize
bioimpedance techniques (Kyle et al., 2004), such as cell culture monitoring systems and
hematocrit meters. Electrical bioimpedance platforms are used to measure the cell cultures
growth, motility, activity, and viability, for the detection of interactions with drugs
(Alexanderetal.,2013) and, more recently, they drive the research for different types of can-
cer (Hong et al., 2011; Huertas et al., 2015; Yu et al., 2016). This method is sensible, nonin-
vasive, and it allows for online monitoring of the electrical and morphological parameters of
7
cell monolayers. It uses low amplitude electrical currents, in the frequency range 1 10 Hz
to measure the impedance of the cells grown on electrodes. Based on the dual properties of
the noble materials (conductors and plasmon structures), recent advances outline the advan-
tages of using the couplings between the alternating electric fields and the surface plasmons,
which seem to pave the way to a new analysis technique called plasmonic electroimpedance
(P-EIS) (Ro¸su-Hamzescu, 2019), that may result in the amplification of the analytic
capabilities to evidence the electric and morphologic properties of the cellular structures.

Computational Modeling in Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics r 2021 Elsevier Inc.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-817897-3.00005-1 All rights reserved. 143