Development of electrical impedance tomography for breast phantom monitoring

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a promising technique in biomedical imaging. Reimaging conductivity distribution within a subject enables the detection of abnormal inclusions within the subject volume. EIT has potential in detection of breast cancer due to variation in impedivity. Using linear difference imaging, variation in impedance within a model can be detected with reference to a base model. The difference approach evaluates the changes in conductivity between two timeframes, allowing the changes and variations be detected. In this paper, investigation of EIT for detection of impurities within a gelatine phantom model is conducted. The ability of a fabricated external sensor belt to detect impurities at various locations are explored along with a voltage distribution graph. Reconstructed images are studied using various image priors and hyperparameter settings to overcome the ill-posed nature of the system. Results showed that the preliminary study of EIT was able to detect difference in EIT images for the breast phantom.