Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has been a heatedly researched medical imaging technique for its functional imaging and safety with easy operation and relatively low cost. However, poor resolution and high error prevent it from practical use. Cheerfully, Dong Liu et al., realized EIT with high resolution and robustness, readily to open a sharp eye for clinical medicine.

The work met its global audience in a most prestigious journal IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging(TMI) titled “A Parametric Level Set Method for Electrical Impedance Tomography”. Such progress was introduced by the Key Laboratory of Microscale Magnetic Resonance of Chinese Academy of Sciences steered by Academician DU Jiangfeng from USTC, marking USTC as first signed institute in the journal for the first time.

As the name implies, Electrical Impedance Tomography is basically developed from different electrical impedance of different tissues in a living body under different functional states. By injecting excitation current or voltage within a safe range to the body surface, measuring the response voltage or current of the body surface and restructuring the distribution of electrical impedance inside the living body, we may explore internal body structures and functions. However, electrical impedance tomography restruction is categorized in some non-linear inverse problems that are severely ill-conditioning, which results in poor resolution and extremely high sensitivity to modeling errors. Undoubtedly, robustness and high resolution must be achieved should the technique be developed.

DU Jiangfeng’s team designed a new algorithm for electrical impedance tomography with utilization of recent parametric level set methods and prior information in clinical medicine, and realized high resolution in image restruction. Loads of simulated experiments also prove that such algorithm is both effective and feasible, confirming its capability of generating images with high resolution and robustness confronted with ubiquitous modeling errors, setting modes of parameter optimization and etc.

Such achievement opens a sharp eye for clinical medicine, and hopefully prompts the Electrical Impedance Tomography to adjust towards more practical fields like pulmonary clinical electrical impedance tomography.

This research is sponsored by Ministry of Science and Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Anhui Province.