Arrangement of boundary electrodes for detection of frontal lobe disease with electrical impedance tomography.

Abstract

Purpose: Caused by brain trauma or blood vessel abnormality, intracerebral hemorrhage and secondary ischemia have become prevalent and severe neurological diseases. The timely and accurate detection of disease is essential for the recovery of patients. As an emerging visualization technique, electrical impedance tomography (EIT) offers an alternative. It is able to reconstruct the conductivity distribution that reflects the pathological variation of human tissue. Approach: In the EIT-based detection, electrodes are usually in uniform arrangement, which may be not suitable in some conditions. To enhance sensitivity in the region of interest, EIT with a novel offset arrangement of boundary electrodes is proposed to image a simulated frontal lobe hemorrhage and secondary ischemia. To cope with the ill-posed inverse problem, the L1 regularization method is developed during the reconstruction. In addition, the impact of noise with a signal-to-noise ratio of 56dB is studied. Results: Compared with the traditional uniform electrode arrangement, the results demonstrate that EIT with the proposed offset arrangement of electrodes is more advantageous for imaging frontal lobe disease. Conclusions: The proposed offset arrangement of electrodes is superior to the traditional uniform arrangement in imaging frontal lobe disease, especially under the impact of noise.