Electrical Property Enhanced Tomography (EPET)

We report a simulation study of a method for enhancing conventional imaging modalities (CT or MI) by adding information about electrical properties of the object under test. While related to the existing impedance imaging methods, the technique reported here differs in a number of substantive ways, EPET does not attempt to create the image with the electrical data but rather adds electrical property information to the existing modality and, in fact, requires the data from the other modality to locate the position of internal structures in the object. Also, this method arrays the electrode sensors on a fixed geometric structure outside the object and connects to the object with an electrically conductive bolus. Electrical data are acquired from all sensors simultaneously in an applied voltage rather than an injected current mode. As a result of these and other features of the technique, the image inversion problem is well conditioned and errors propagated from input to output are actually reduced by about two orders of magnitude