Study Quantifies Electrical Properties of Liver Tissue with Tumors

Ex vivo impedance measurements were conducted on excised hepatic tissue from 10 human patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, making it the largest study of its kind to date.

Many existing and emerging diagnostic and treatment methods rely on electrical properties of tissue. By establishing a reliable source of tissue data, valuable information can be provided to build new cancer treatment techniques.

Tracing published data for human livers over the past 80 years, the data reported in the study represents the largest number of patients and measurement points collected for a detailed statistical analysis. In this work, the authors report on the electrical properties of human hepatic tissue with metastatic disease from colorectal cancer using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) measurements on tumor tissue, and the surrounding normal tissue.

For the first time, the study reveals statistically significant electrical permittivity differences over select frequencies for normal and tumor tissue, suggesting electrical permittivity as a new metric for differentiating between tumor tissue and normal tissue.

“This work provides a detailed, statistically- backed tabulation of quantifiable data collected from several patients,” said Shaurya Prakash, assistant professor, who led the study. “Apart from reporting new metrics for tissue analysis, the main contribution of the study is that it is a first step toward developing a large database of reliable human tissue data for metastatic colorectal cancer.”

The research team enlisted a broad coalition including collaboration between Prakash and Professor Vish Subramaniam, both in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and a medical team of surgeons, physicians and pathologists from The Department of Pathology and The Division of Surgical Oncology at The Ohio State University.

The paper was published in February 2015 in Physiological Measurement, an archival publication of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.