Exploring and Evaluating Micro-environment and Nanoparticle Dielectrophoretic-induced Interactions with Image Analysis Methods1

Nanoparticle interactions with micron-scale environments can be induced using dielectrophoresis (DEP). A new DEP signaling and additive noise model is developed from first principles. It is applied to fluorescence microscope CCD video images of fluorescently labeled, 200 nm diameter, latex nanospheres moved by pulsed, positive DEP (pDEP) onto 5 micron planar castellated electrode edges. The model increases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for the time dependent spatial mean of the video frame fluorescence intensity and thereby enables correlation with the spatial standard deviation (std) statistic. Deterministic pDEP-induced collections are approximately linearly correlated, whereas thermally-driven, random, nanoparticle movements are nonlinearly correlated.