Low-parametric Induced Current - Magnetic Resonance Electrical Impedance Tomography for quantitative conductivity estimation of brain tissues using a priori information: A simulation study

Accurate estimation of the human head conductivity is important for the diagnosis and therapy of brain diseases. Induced Current - Magnetic Resonance Electrical Impedance Tomography (IC-MREIT) is a recently developed non-invasive technique for conductivity estimation. This paper presents a formulation where a low number of material parameters need to be estimated, starting from MR eddy-current field maps. We use a parameterized frequency dependent 4-Cole-Cole material model, an efficient independent impedance method for eddy-current calculations and a priori information through the use of voxel models. The proposed procedure circumvents the ill-posedness of traditional IC-MREIT and computational efficiency is obtained by using an efficient forward eddy-current solver.