EIT image reconstruction with four dimensional regularization

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) reconstructs internal impedance images of the body from electrical measurements on body surface. The temporal resolution of EIT data can be very high, although the spatial resolution of the images is relatively low. Most EIT reconstruction algorithms calculate images from data frames independently, although data are actually highly correlated especially in high speed EIT systems. This paper proposes a 4-D EIT image reconstruction for functional EIT. The new approach is developed to directly use prior models of the temporal correlations among images and 3-D spatial correlations among image elements. A fast algorithm is also developed to reconstruct the regularized images. Image reconstruction is posed in terms of an augmented image and measurement vector which are concatenated from a specific number of previous and future frames. The reconstruction is then based on an augmented regularization matrix which reflects the a priori constraints on temporal and 3-D spatial correlations of image elements. A temporal factor reflecting the relative strength of the image correlation is objectively calculated from measurement data. Results show that image reconstruction models which account for inter-element correlations, in both space and time, show improved resolution and noise performance, in comparison to simpler image models.