Kangping Hu Ph.D.’22, was recently awarded Best Paper among all submissions from the 2021 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS). Hu’s paper “Super-Resolution Electrochemical Impedance Imaging with a 100x100 CMOS Sensor Array” was co-authored by Brown postdoctoral researcher Chris Arcadia Ph.D.’19, and the senior author was Associate Professor Jacob Rosenstein. The award was announced at BioCAS 2022 in Taipei, Taiwan.
The paper presents a new semiconductor sensor chip that applies super-resolution techniques to electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). Super-resolution imaging is a family of techniques in which multiple lower-resolution images can be merged to produce a single image at higher resolution. While super-resolution is often applied to optical systems, it can also be used with other modes of imaging. The new sensor is designed to measure the mutual capacitance between programmable pairs of 10-micron pixels, and multiple spatially-resolved measurements can then be computationally combined to produce super-resolution impedance images. Experimental measurements of sub-cellular permittivity distributions in single algae cells demonstrate the potential of this new approach. This sensor chip can produce all-electrical images of cell cultures, with no illumination, no lenses, no labels, and no moving parts.
An extended journal paper (“Super-Resolution Electrochemical Impedance Imaging With a 512 × 256 CMOS Sensor Array”) based on this work has also been recently published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems. This research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and DARPA.
Hu successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in August, and he is now a research engineer at Apple, Inc.