Feasibility Study of Early Pressure Ulcer Detection Using Electrical Impedance Tomography

Pressure ulcers are chronic skin wounds with a particularly high morbidity and a relatively low recovery rate. At present, there is still a lack of a portable and visual real-time monitoring system for early pressure ulcers. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a kind of functional imaging technique that can diagnose the healthy condition in the measured tissues by visualizing the distribution of bioelectrical impedance parameters. According to the principle of electrical characteristic of pressure ulcers, i.e., changes in physiological and pathological information of tissues caused by pressure lead to changes in electrical impedance of tissues, a noninvasive imaging system of pressure ulcers based on EIT with novel flexible electrode array is proposed. Two kinds of 3-D finite element simulation models are constructed to discuss the measurement effects of the flexible array on simulated pressure ulcers at different locations, depths, and with different sizes. The effects of different imaging algorithms on imaging results are also compared and analyzed. Physical phantom model experiments and preliminary experiments on human skin are conducted. Both simulations and physical experiments indicate that EIT technique is excepted to realize a safer, portable, low-cost, and visual real-time monitoring system for early pressure ulcers.