Magnetic resonance-electrical impedance tomography in breast cancer imaging

Magnetic resonance - electrical impedance tomography employs low amplitude currents injected or induced inside an object. The additional magnetic field due to these currents results in a phase in the MR images. A modified fast spin-echo sequence is used to measure this magnetic field, which is simply the scaled phase MR image. Finite element method is used for the solution of the forward problem. An iterated sensitivity matrix based algorithm was developed for the inverse problem. Resulting ill-conditioned matrix equation was regularized using Tikhonov method and solved using a conjugate gradient solver. After assessing the performance of the technique with agarose gel phantoms, we carried out experiments on rats with induced tumor to understand the in-vivo performance of this system