Spectroscopic imaging of a dilute cell suspension (Q267062)

The purpose of this work is to study the behavior of biological tissue under the influence of an electric field of a certain frequency. Effective admittance spectroscopy provides information about the microscopic structure of the medium and physiological and pathological conditions of the tissue. The authors studied a periodic suspension of identical cells of arbitrary shape and used homogenization techniques with asymptotic expansions to derive a homogenized problem. In the first part of the paper, they analyzed the problem and presented existence and uniqueness results along with some useful a priori estimates. The authors used a two-scale convergence technique to prove the convergence of the original problem to the homogenized one. They considered the problem of determining the effective property of a suspension of cells when the volume fraction goes to zero (dilute suspension, i.e. cells have much less volume than the medium surrounding them). Next part of the paper is devoted to spectroscopic imaging of a dilute suspension and the authors made use of the asymptotic expansion of the effective admittivity in terms of the volume fraction to image a permittivity inclusion. A measure of the conductivity anisotropy is introduced and its dependence on the frequency of the applied current is studied. The authors have shown that their results can be extended to the random case by considering randomly deformed periodic medium, and they derived a new formula for the overall conductivity of a dilute suspension of randomly deformed cells. The last part of the paper is devoted to numerical simulations in two dimensions illustrating the fact that the Debye relaxation times are characteristics of the microscopic structures of the tissue.