Development of a Cardiac-and-Piezoelectric Hybrid System for Cardiac Drug Screening

• Main Authors: Yun-Han Huang, 黃筠涵
• Other Authors: Yu-Hsiang Hsu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/31114408013470116014

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 應用力學研究所 === 105 === The drug screening process has been an essential factor in the drug development process. To study the cardiac behavior under drug treatment, the cardiac systolic and diastolic forces, beating frequency, and contractile profile are the most concerned parameters. Hence, monitoring the force is necessary in cardiac drug screening. To acquire quantitative force profiles, most of the current monitoring systems choose to monitor the contractions of sarcomeres or the deformation of flexible substrates by an optical system and high-resolution cameras. Then, the cardiac force profiles are obtained by estimations and calculations on the captured images. However, there are some inevitable limitations of these optical systems: First, since the optical images are the projections of the deformed structure, the detected force profile is an indirect estimation. In addition, the images captured need to be processed by a specialist, which is difficult to convert into a fully automatic process. Finally, the number of devices can be processed is limited by the image field of the optical system. To bypass the limitation of the optical systems, and to achieve an automatic, real-time and direct measurement of cardiac force profile, a cardiac–and–piezoelectric hybrid system for cardiac drug screening was developed in this project. The polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) thin film was used to implement the circular piezoelectric transducer in this study. Substrates with different extracellular matrices (ECM) coated were tested to optimize the best cardiomyocyte adhesion promoter. Furthermore, an interface system and electromagnetic (EMI) shielding were built, which can directly convert the mechanical stress of cardiomyocyte into electrical signals, and to reduce the noise from the environment. Finally, this cardiac-and-piezoelectric system was verified by treatment of two commercialized drugs: Isoproterenol and Metoprolol. It was demonstrated that the developed cardiac-and-piezoelectric hybrid platform could detect the real-time contraction profile of cardiac tissue, and the platform could monitor the cardiac behavior under drug treatment based on the measured force profile. In summary, an automatic and real-time hybrid system for cardiac drug screening was developed. This system could potentially become a fully automatic and massive screening platform for the cardiac drug discovery process.