Direct Measurement of Contraction Force in Cardiac Tissue Construct in 2D-Plane Using Dual Axis Cantilever Sensor

In this work, we present a technique for a dual axis contraction force measurement of human cell based cardiac tissue constructs. The cardiac tissue constructs consist of a vascular-like network and induced pluripotent stem cell derived cardiomyocytes. Before the force measurements, the cardiac tissue constructs were detached from the culture substrate to allow less restricted contraction. The in-house prepared force sensors are composed of piezoelectric sensing elements and a metallic cantilever for contacting the cardiac tissue constructs. A dedicated measurement platform with embedded signal processing software is used for data acquisition from the sensors. Dual axis force sensor results are compared with our previously developed single axis force sensor technique. Additionally, the proposed dual axis force measurement system can measure two-dimensional displacement trajectories of the cantilever probe tip. We propose a pattern matching method for classification of the captured cardiac contraction cycle patterns and for extracting anomalies in the measured cycles. We demonstrate both single and dual axis peak cardiac construct contraction force measurement results in the ranges of 3.4 - 6.7 μN and 9.4 - 10.6 μN, respectively. The relative standard deviation of the peak contraction force results varied between 1.0 and 4.1% in eight captured 60 second measurement sequences.