Comparison of bolus- and filtering-based EIT measures of lung perfusion in an animal model

Two main functional imaging approaches have been used to measure regional lung perfusion using electrical impedance tomography (EIT): venous injection of a hypertonic saline contrast agent and imaging of its passage through the heart and lungs, and digital filtering of heart-frequency impedance changes over sequences of EIT images. This paper systematically compares filtering-based perfusion estimates and bolus injection methods to determine to which degree they are related.

EIT data was recorded on seven mechanically ventilated newborn lambs in which ventilation distribution was varied through changes in posture between prone, supine, left- and right-lateral positions. Perfusion images were calculated using frequency filtering and ensemble averaging during both ventilation and apnoea time segments for each posture to compare against contrast agent-based methods using Jaccard distance score.

Using bolus-based EIT measures of lung perfusion as the reference frequency filtering techniques performed better than ensemble averaging and both techniques performed equally well across apnoea and ventilation data segments.

Our results indicate the potential for use of filtering-based EIT measures of heart-frequency activity as a non-invasive proxy for contrast agent injection-based measures of lung perfusion.