Electrical Impedance Tomography using the finite element method in the mammography geometry

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has shown great potential to be used as a method for breast cancer screening. Combining EIT with x-ray mammography allows for both sets of data to be used in conjunction to make a more accurate diagnosis. Previous efforts to implement EIT in the mammography geometry have used analytical solutions to the forward model. This paper presents a three dimensional numerical forward model which uses a finite element method (FEM) to implement the complete electrode model (CEM) in EIT. We show that the numerical solution achieves greater accuracy than analytic models, and opens the way to implement an iterative inversion algorithm.