CT Image-Guided Electrical Impedance Tomography for Medical Imaging

This study presents a computed tomography (CT) image-guided electrical impedance tomography (EIT) method for medical imaging. CT is a robust imaging modality for accurately reconstructing the density structure of the region being scanned. EIT can detect electrical impedance abnormalities to which CT scans may be insensitive, but the poor spatial resolution of EIT is a major concern for medical applications. A cross-gradient method has been introduced for oil and gas exploration to jointly invert multiple geophysical datasets associated with different medium properties in the same geological structure. In this study, we develop a CT image-guided EIT (CEIT) based on the cross-gradient method. We assume that both CT scanning and EIT imaging are conducted for the same medical target. A CT scan is first acquired to help solve the subsequent EIT imaging problem. During EIT imaging, we apply cross gradients between the CT image and the electrical conductivity distribution to iteratively constrain the conductivity inversion. The cross-gradient based method allows the mutual structures of different physical models to be referenced without directly affecting the polarity and amplitude of each model during the inversion. We apply the CEIT method to both numerical simulations and phantom experiments. The effectiveness of CEIT is demonstrated in comparison with conventional EIT. The comparison shows that the CEIT method can significantly improve the quality of conductivity images.