Boundary Element Method for Electrical Impedance Tomography / Método dos elementos de contorno para tomografia de impedância elétrica

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

The Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a quite new technique and has proved to be promising in obtaining inner body images exploring the differences between electric qualities (conductivity and permissity) of different materials that constitute it. The technique is based on applying an electric potential profile or electric current on the boundary of the body section and by measuring the response. From the relation of data of excitement and response, the distribution of conductivity in the interior of the dominion is assessed, what may be translated, computationally, as an image of that section. Although being promising, the EIT still presents difficulties, especially regarding image definition and the long time taken to its reconstruction. A EIT image reconstruction is a task done in two phases: first, one must solve the direct problem which is basically the determination of electrical potentials in the interior of the dominion and the responses on the boundary from the excitation data; second, the inverse problem must be solved, which is the determination of conductivity of the inner points of the dominion from the relation between the excitation data and the response on the boundary. Depending on the method used to solve the inverse problem, the direct problem must be iterative solved countless times, burdening the process computationally. This work has the purpose of applying the Boundary Element Method (BEM) as numeric resolution technique of the direct problem. The advantage is that the BEM requires only the discretization of the boundary and not of the whole dominion, as it occurs with the other methods. This decrease in the problem dimension reduces the size of the linear system to be solved at each resolution of the direct problem, what may reduce satisfactory the computational time employed on the reconstruction of each image. For that, a C language program was implemented, which solves the direct problem of the EIT, particularly for a two dimensional dominion, using the BEM. The program, at first, accepts generic forms of the dominion geometry and of boundary conditions. Tests were performed with square and circular and with different types and values for the boundaries conditions. The obtained results were compared to analytic results as well as the ones obtained from literature and were quite satisfactory.

ASSUNTO(S)

imagem médica boundary element method electrical impedance tomography método dos elementos de contorno tomografia de impedância elétrica direct problem medical image problema direto

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