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Updated: Jul 13, 2026

Clinical Imaging of Microwave Mammography
Published on: November 14, 2025
Validation of a finite-element solution for electrical impedance tomography in an anisotropic medium
Juan-Felipe P J Abascal1, Simon R Arridge, William R B Lionheart
1Department of Medical Physics, University College London, London, UK. j.abascal@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Abstract:
Electrical impedance tomography is an imaging method, with which volumetric images of conductivity are produced by injecting electrical current and measuring boundary voltages. It has the potential to become a portable non-invasive medical imaging technique. Until now, implementations have neglected anisotropy even though human tissues such as bone, muscle and brain white matter are markedly anisotropic. We present a numerical solution using the finite-element method that has been modified for modelling anisotropic conductive media. It was validated in an anisotropic domain against an analytical solution in an isotropic medium after the isotropic domain was diffeomorphically transformed into an anisotropic one. Convergence of the finite element to the analytical solution was verified by showing that the finite-element error norm decreased linearly related to the finite-element size, as the mesh density increased, for the simplified case of Laplace's equation in a cubic domain with a Dirichlet boundary condition.
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