Resolution Guarantees in Electrical Impedance Tomography

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) uses current-voltage measurements on the surface of an imaging subject to detect conductivity changes or anomalies. EIT is a promising new technique with great potential in medical imaging and non-destructive testing. However, in many applications, EIT suffers from inconsistent reliability due to its enormous sensitivity to modeling and measurement errors. In this work, we show that it is principally possible to give rigorous resolution guarantees in EIT even in the presence of systematic and random measurement errors. We derive a constructive criterion to decide whether a desired resolution can be achieved in a given measurement setup. Our results cover the case where anomalies of a known minimal contrast in a subject with imprecisely known background conductivity are to be detected from noisy measurements on a number of electrodes with imprecisely known contact impedances. The considered settings are still idealized in the sense that the shape of the imaging subject has to be known and the allowable amount of uncertainty is rather low. Nevertheless, we believe that this may be a starting point to identify new applications and to design and optimize measurement setups in EIT.