A new tool to assess mechanical and dielectric properties of tissues

In this paper a new tool to assess viscoelastic and dielectric properties of biological samples is presented. Shear horizontal polarized surface acoustic waves (SH-SAW) are used to detect the viscoelastic properties of the extracellular matrix (ECM) expelled by adhering fibroblast cell cultures. Therefore a one-port SAW resonator, with a fundamental mode of 85 MHz was developed. Its electrode structure can be used simultaneously to detect the dielectric behavior of the whole system by impedance spectroscopy (IS) while the frequency ranges from kHz to MHz. The applicability of the combination of both methods appearing as new tool is exemplarily shown by cell adhesion experiments performed with L929 and NIH-3T3 fibroblasts.