Boundary modelling in electrical impedance tomography (Q4356955)

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a technique which attempts to create images of the electrical conductivity distribution of the material in the interior of an object. In many situations the widely differing electrical properties of the various types of matter within the object mean that the image so created is effectively an image of the distribution of these different types of material. The method proceeds by applying a variety of electric currents to the object using electrodes placed on its surface. A voltage distribution is induced in the object and this is measured on its surface, again via a number of electrodes. These data are used by a reconstruction algorithm to generate the image of the internal conductivity distribution. It is well known that image reconstruction in EIT is a highly ill-posed, nonlinear inverse problem and that the images produced are very sensitive to a wide range of possible errors which can occur in the technique. These errors are many and varied but it is clear that the interface between the electrodes and the object being imaged is a particularly important aspect of the system which needs to be considered very carefully. It is here that the data is measured and it is important that it is of the highest possible quality. There is the problem of the existence of an unknwon contact impedance between the electrodes and the body surface which makes the interpretation of the measured data very difficult. This problem is resolved in a variety of ways by different groups working on EIT and it is an analysis of this problem which forms the content of this paper. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0871.00041].