OPTIMAL EXPERIMENTS IN ELECTRICAL-IMPEDANCE TOMOGRAPHY

Electrical impedance tomography is a non-invasive imaging technique wh ich aims to image the impedance within a body from electrical measurem ents made on the surface. The reconstruction of impedance images is a ill-posed problem which is both extremely sensitive to noise and highl y computationally intensive. This paper defines an experimental measur ement in EIT and calculates optimal experiments which maximize the dis tinguishability between the region to be imaged and a best-estimate co nductivity distribution. These optimal experiments can be derived from measurements made on the boundary. The analysis clarifies the propert ies of different voltage measurement schemes. A reconstruction algorit hm based on the use of optimal experiments is derived. It is shown to be many times faster than standard Newton-based reconstruction algorit hms, and results from synthetic data indicate that the images that it produces are comparable.