Sensitivity comparisons of cylindrical and hemi-spherical coil setups for magnetic induction tomography

Abstract

In this simulation study, we evaluate and compare the cylindrical and the hemi-spherical coil setups of two Magnetic Induction Tomography (MIT) systems using sensitivity analysis. Furthermore, different parameters for the size and the number of measurement and excitation coils are tested. For evaluating the sensitivity to conductivity values, the edge finite element method with uniform tetrahedral elements is utilized. The volume of interest is defined by a sphere, which represents a generic measurement object similar to the human head. A figure of merit that describes the general sensitivity to conductivity changes within the upper half of this volume, and two plots representing the distribution of sensitivity values are computed. Our findings indicate that the hemi-spherical MIT system with a smaller distance between the layer of coils and the measurement object shows a clearly higher sensitivity compared to the cylindrical MIT system. In addition, the two simulated setups with larger coil areas provide higher sensitivities in relation to the standard setups, while the difference between the hemi-spherical setups using a different number of coils with identical areas is relatively small.