An Electrical Impedance Tomography Sensor with Different Diameter

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has been proposed to assess the adipose tissue distribution in the upper arm of patients with different arm diameters. The aim of this study is to develop an adjustable EIT sensor, whose diameter can be adjusted within a certain range by changing the electrode-to-gap ratio (EGR) of the EIT sensor. In order to improve the reconstructed image quality and stability, investigation of the effect of changing the diameter of EIT sensor is needed. A prototype EIT sensor with an adjustable diameter and consisting of 32 electrodes was manufactured and evaluated through experimental studies. The experimental results show that the EIT sensor with the adjustable diameter can provide similar reconstructed images just as the traditional EIT sensor which has a fixed sensor diameter. The adjustable EIT sensor can therefore adapt the EIT to the changing diameters of the upper arm of different patients during the adipose tissue assessment.