Computational framework for applying electrical impedance tomography to head imaging

Abstract: This work introduces a computational framework for applying absolute electrical impedance tomography to head imaging without accurate information on the head shape or the electrode positions. A library of fifty heads is employed to build a principal component model for the typical variations in the shape of the human head, which leads to a relatively accurate parametrization for head shapes with only a few free parameters. The estimation of these shape parameters and the electrode positions is incorporated in a regularized Newton-type output least squares reconstruction algorithm. The presented numerical experiments demonstrate that strong enough variations in the internal conductivity of a human head can be detected by absolute electrical impedance tomography even if the geometric information on the measurement configuration is incomplete to an extent that is to be expected in practice.