Why the study?
Few studies have investigated optimal measurement protocols or key confounders for biological tissue electrical properties, though preliminary work suggests probe contact force affects measurements.
Probe contact force significantly affects tissue conductivity measurements in the left atrial appendage, highlighting the need to control for contact force in future experiments.
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Contact force alters left atrial appendage conductivity readings; animal data leaves open need for force-controlled protocols before clinical use.
The electrical properties of many biological tissues are freely available from the INRC and the IT'IS databases. However, particularly in lower frequency ranges, few studies have investigated the optimal measurement protocol or the key confounders that need to be controlled, monitored, and reported. However, preliminary work suggests that the contact force of the measurement probe on the tissue sample can affect the measurements. The aim of this paper is to investigate the conductivity change due to the probe contact force in detail. Twenty ex vivo bovine heart samples are used, and conductivity measurements are taken in the Left Atrial Appendage, a common target for medical device developments. The conductivity measurements reported in this work (between 0.14 S/m and 0.24 S/m) align with the literature. The average conductivity is observed to change by -21% as the contact force increases from 2 N to 10 N. In contrast, in conditions where the fluid concentration in the measurement area is expected to be lower, very small changes are observed (less than 2.5%). These results suggest that the LAA conductivity is affected by the contact force due to the fluid concentration in the tissue. This work suggests that contact force should be controlled for in all future experiments.
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Benchakroun et al. (2022) studied this question.
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