3-DIMENSIONAL IMAGE-RECONSTRUCTION FOR ELECTRICAL-IMPEDANCE TOMOGRAPHY

Very little work has been conducted on three-dimensional aspects of el ectrical impedance tomography (EIT), partly due to the increased compu tational complexity over the two-dimensional aspects of EIT. Neverthel ess, extending EIT to three-dimensional data acquisition and image rec onstruction may afford significant advantages such as an increase in t he size of the independent data set and improved spatial resolution. H owever, considerable challenges are associated with the software aspec ts of three-dimensional EIT systems due to the requirement for accurat e three-dimensional forward problem modelling and the derivation of th ree-dimensional image reconstruction algorithms. This paper outlines t he work performed to date to derive a three-dimensional image reconstr uction algorithm for EIT based on the inversion of the sensitivity mat rix approach for a finite right circular cylinder. A comparison in ter ms of the singular-value spectra and the singular vectors between the sensitivity matrices for a three-dimensional cylinder and a two-dimens ional disc has been performed. This comparison shows that the three-di mensional image reconstruction algorithm recruits more central informa tion at lower condition numbers than the two-dimensional image reconst ruction algorithm.