Numerical simulations of electric and acoustic fields in human abdomen models

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a relatively new non-invasion imaging technique, and owns many potential biomedical applications. However, due to the ill-posed character of EIT, its spatial resolution is low. To deal with the problem, a series of numerical tests are conducted to find out the feasibility of using EIT and Ultrasound Transmission Tomography (UTT) dual-modality tomography to diagnose the lesions in human abdomen model. The numerical tests are based on a two-dimensional anatomical model. The results show that the EIT and UTT are complementary with each other. EIT is theoretically sensitive to the conductivity changes occurring at the boundary of the objective domain, while UTT is theoretically sensitive to the attenuation constant changes near the center of the objective domain. In particular, EIT owns a high sensitivity at the liver region, while UTT owns a higher sensitivity at the kidney region. The image reconstruction results further proved this point. EIT provides desirable results for the lesions located at the liver regions, while UTT provides desirable results for the lesions located at the kidney regions.