Reduction of Spike-like Noise in Clinical Practice for Thoracic Electrical Impedance Tomography Using Robust...

Thoracic electrical impedance tomography (EIT) provides real-time, bedside imaging of pulmonary function and has demonstrated significant clinical value in guiding treatment strategies for critically ill patients. However, the practical application of EIT remains challenging due to its susceptibility to measurement disturbances, such as electrode contact problems and patient movement. These disturbances often manifest as spike-like noise that can severely degrade EIT image quality. To address this issue, we propose a robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA)-based approach that models EIT data as the sum of a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix. The low-rank matrix captures the underlying physiological signals, while the sparse matrix contains spike-like noise components. In simulation studies considering different spike magnitudes, widths and channels, all the image correlation coefficients between RPCA-processed images and the ground truth exceeded 0.99, and the image error of the original fEIT image with spike-like noise was much larger than that after RPCA processing. In eight patient cases, RPCA significantly improved the image quality (image error: p < 0.001; image correlation coefficient: p < 0.001) and enhanced the clinical EIT-based indexes accuracy (p < 0.001). Therefore, we conclude that RPCA is a promising technique for reducing spike-like noise in clinical EIT data, thereby improving data quality and potentially facilitating broader clinical application of EIT.