Influencing factors on abdomen lesion detection using electrical impedance tomography

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive imaging method to reconstruct the conductivity distribution within a closed domain. Due to the advantages of low-cost, high temporal resolution and non-radiation, EIT owns many potential biomedical applications. However, compared with other imaging technique, such as CT and MRI, EIT suffers from poor spatial resolution. To study the feasibility of EIT on human abdomen lesion detection, a series of two-dimensional numerical simulations were conducted based on a specially designed anatomical human abdomen model. Influence of the degrees of measurement noise, as well as the size and conductivity of target lesion was discussed. The results show that the precision of EIT image reconstruction results increases with the improvement of signal to noise ratio. According to this point, the smallest conductivity variation and size of lesion that can just be detected by the method of EIT were discussed. The study is helpful to predict the smallest lesion that can just be detected using EIT with a certain measurement noise and optimize the system to detect specific abdomen lesions.