Modeling of the Cell-Electrode Interface Noise for Microelectrode Arrays

Microelectrodes are widely used in the physiological recording of cell field potentials. As microelectrode signals are generally in the μV range, characteristics of the cell-electrode interface are important to the recording accuracy. Although the impedance of the microelectrode-solution interface has been well studied and modeled in the past, no effective model has been experimentally verified to estimate the noise of the cell-electrode interface. Also in existing interface models, spectral information is largely disregarded. In this work, we developed a model for estimating the noise of the cell-electrode interface from interface impedances. This model improves over existing noise models by including the cell membrane capacitor and frequency dependent impedances. With low-noise experiment setups, this model is verified by microelectrode array (MEA) experiments with mouse muscle myoblast cells. Experiments show that the noise estimated from this model has <;10% error, which is much less than estimations from existing models. With this model, noise of the cell-electrode interface can be estimated by simply measuring interface impedances. This model also provides insights for micro- electrode design to achieve good recording signal-to-noise ratio.