Stability of the isotropic conductivity reconstruction using magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT)

Abstract

Magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) is a high-resolution imaging modality that aims to reconstruct the objects' conductivity distributions at low frequency using the measurable $z$-th component of the magnetic flux density obtained from an MRI scanner. Traditional reconstruction algorithms in MREIT use two data subject to two linearly independent current densities. However, the temporal resolution of such a MREIT image is relatively low. Recently, a single current MREIT has been proposed to improve the temporal resolution. Even though a series of reconstruction algorithms have been proposed in the last two decades, the theoretical studies of MREIT are still quite limited. This paper presents the stability theorems for two datum and a single data-based isotropic conductivity reconstruction using MREIT. Using the regularity theory of elliptic partial differential equations, we prove that the only instability in the inverse problem of MREIT comes from taking the second-order derivative of the measured data $B_z$, the $z$-th component of the magnetic flux density. To get a stable reconstruction from the noisy $B_z$ data, we note that the edge structure of $\nabla B_z$ reveals the edge features in the unknown conductivity and provides an edge-preserving denoising approach for the $\nabla B_z$ data. We use a modified Shepp-Logan phantom model to validate the proposed theory and the denoising approach.