Rotational electrical impedance tomography using electrodes with limited surface coverage provides window for multimodal sensing

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is an imaging method that could become a valuable tool in multimodal applications. One challenge in simultaneous multimodal imaging is that typically the EIT electrodes cover a large portion of the object surface. This paper investigates the feasibility of rotational EIT (rEIT) in applications where electrodes cover only a limited angle of the surface of the object. In the studied rEIT, the object is rotated a full 360° during a set of measurements to increase the information content of the data. We call this approach limited angle full revolution rEIT (LAFR-rEIT). We test LAFR-rEIT setups in two-dimensional geometries with computational and experimental data. We use up to 256 rotational measurement positions, which requires a new way to solve the forward and inverse problem of rEIT. For this, we provide a modification, available for EIDORS, in the supplementary material. The computational results demonstrate that LAFR-rEIT with eight electrodes produce the same image quality as conventional 16-electrode rEIT, when data from an adequate number of rotational measurement positions are used. Both computational and experimental results indicate that the novel LAFR-rEIT provides good EIT with setups with limited surface coverage and a small number of electrodes.