A noise-controlling method by hybrid current-stimulation and voltage-measurement for electrical impedance tomography (HCSVM-EIT)

Abstract

Image reconstruction in electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a typical ill-posed inverse problem, from which the stability of conductivity reconstruction affects the reliability of physiological parameters evaluation. In order to improve the stability, the effect of boundary voltage noise on conductivity reconstruction should be controlled. A noise-controlling method based on hybrid current-stimulation and voltage-measurement for EIT (HCSVM-EIT) is proposed for stable conductivity reconstruction. In HCSVM-EIT, the boundary voltage is measured by one current-stimulation and voltage-measurement pattern (high-SNR pattern) with a higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); the sensitivity matrix is calculated by another current-stimulation and voltage-measurement pattern (low-cond pattern) with a lower condition number; the boundary voltage is then transformed from the high-SNR pattern into the low-cond pattern by multiplying by an optimized transformation matrix for image reconstruction. The stability of conductivity reconstruction is improved by combining the advantages of the high-SNR pattern for boundary voltage measurement and the low-cond pattern for sensitivity matrix calculation. The simulation results show that the HCSVM-EIT increases the correlation coefficient (CC) of conductivity reconstruction. The experiment results show that the CC of conductivity reconstruction of the human lower limb is increased from 0.3424 to 0.5580 by 62.97% compared to the quasi-adjacent pattern, and from 0.4942 to 0.5580 by 12.91% compared to the adjacent pattern. In conclusion, the stable conductivity reconstruction with higher CC in HCSVM-EIT improves the reliability of physiological parameters evaluation for disease detection.