Stable reconstruction of piecewise continuous plane stratified biological tissues via electrical impedance tomography

Image reconstruction in electrical impedance tomography is, generally, an ill-posed nonlinear inverse problem. Regularization methods are widely used to ensure a stable solution. Herein, we present a case study, which uses a novel electrical impedance tomography method for reconstruction of layered biological tissues with piecewise continuous plane-stratified profiles. The algorithm implements the recently proposed reconstruction scheme for piecewise constant conductivity profiles, utilizing Legendre expansion in conjunction with improved Prony method. It is shown that the proposed algorithm is capable of successfully reconstructing piecewise continuous conductivity profiles with moderate slop. This reconstruction procedure, which calculates both the locations and the conductivities, repetitively provides inhomogeneous depth discretization, i.e., the depths grid is not equispaced. Incorporation of this specific inhomogeneous grid in the widely used mean least square reconstruction procedure results in a stable and accurate reconstruction, whereas, the commonly selected equispaced depth grid leads to unstable reconstruction. This observation establishes the main result of our investigation, highlighting the impact of physical phenomenon (the image series expansion) on electrical impedance tomography, leading to a physically motivated stabilization of the inverse problem, i.e., an inhomogeneous depth discretization renders an inherent regularization of the mean least square algorithm. The effectiveness and the significance of inhomogeneous discretization in electrical impedance tomography reconstruction procedure is further demonstrated and verified via numerical simulations.