Biomedical applications of electrical impedance tomography

Abstract

The interdisciplinary nature of biomedical applications of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) sets many challenges that require an integrated approach to problem solving. This issue of Physiological Measurement follows a tradition of special issues on EIT, providing the opportunity for mathematicians, engineers, physicists and clinicians to present the results of this challenging work and demonstrate the interdisciplinary approach to their research. The Fourth Conference on Biomedical Applications of Electrical Impedance Tomography, held at UMIST, Manchester in April 2003, follows the successful Mummy Range Workshop on Electrical Impedance Tomography, which was held during August 2002 in Colorado. The 2003 conference was the first non-funded conference to take place after the successful series of EPRSC-funded EIT conferences organized by David Holder in London. The commitment of the EIT community to this conference shows that the state of EIT research is still healthy with new researchers joining the research community each year. It was heartening for the organizers that so many from distant countries were able to attend this meeting at a time when international travel was overshadowed by an epedemic of SARS and war. Plans are already in place for the next conference in Poland, which will be combined with ICEBI XII, but will still keep it own identity as the fifth meeting in this series.The main themes of this special issue include a larger contribution of clinical applications, which is encouraging. New themes are emerging, including MREIT, bringing together EIT and magnetic resonance imaging, while the use of inductively coupled systems for EIT also continues to grow. In terms of technical developments, there appear to be a wealth of new mathematical methods and hardware, but these new methods have yet to be evaluated and applied to clinical systems. The importance of the numerical algorithm cannot be underestimated, but there remains a gap between the application of new methods to simulated data and to real medical problems. Unfortunately many clinical studies have not exploited the best available algorithms but simply settled for simple algorithms which have known limitations. Often the results are inconclusive. Interdisciplinary gatherings such as this, the first of the UK meetings to be hosted by a mathematics department, actively encourage collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. It is our hope that the fruit of this meeting will be a strengthening of such collaborations.Another issue, which needs addressing, is the need to involve more physicians in the research community; for EIT to be accepted and validated as a viable clinical tool, the role of medical doctors cannot be underestimated. It is also important that the biomedical EIT research community develops links with those working on applications of electrical imaging in geophysics, industrial process monitoring and non-destructive testing, as well as related inverse problems such as optical absorption and scattering tomography and other optical and low-frequency electromagnetic imaging methods.The future of EIT looks healthy, as demonstrated by the collection of papers in this special issue, which provides evidence of significant advances in all areas of this research field.