Static three-dimensional electrical impedance tomography

In electrical impedance tomography, an approximation for the internal resistivity distribution is computed based on the knowledge of the voltages and currents on the surface of the body, Usually, it is assumed that the injected current?, stay at the two-dimensional (2D) electrode plane and the reconstruction is based on 2D assumptions. However, the currents spread out in three dimensions (3D) and therefore the structures out of the current injection plane mag. have significant effect on the reconstructed images. We have studied possibilities of a finite element-based method to reconstruct static 3D images from real measurements made on a saline-filled tank. We show that the 3D static images obtained from simple experiments are better than the 2D difference images obtained from the same object. We further show that the static images obtained with 2D calculations are much worse than the images obtained with 3D calculations. We also discuss the effects of the boundary shape error on the reconstructed static 3D images.