Variational constraints for electrical-impedance tomography.

The task of electrical-impedance tomography is to invert boundary measurements for the conductivity distribution of a body. This inverse problem can be formulated so the primary data are the measured powers dissipated across injection electrodes. Then, since these powers are minima of the pertinent (dual) variational principles, feasibility constraints can be found for the nonlinear inversion problem. When power may be measured accurately, the existence of these dual variational principles implies that any exact solution must lie at a point of intersection of the two feasibility boundaries.