A Chicken Tissue Phantom for Studying an Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) System Suitable for Clinical Imaging

The study of practical phantoms is essential for assessing the reconstruction algorithms and instrumentation used in Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). Responses of saline phantoms with insulator inhomogeneities differ from the real tissue phantoms in several aspects. Also, it is difficult to reconstruct the actual resistivity of the insulator inhomogeneity in a saline background because of their large resistivity difference. A practical biological phantom consisting of two different materials with low resistivity difference is more suitable for impedance imaging studies. In order to demonstrate this, a chicken tissue phantom was developed to study the resistivity imaging in EIT. A 16-electrode array was placed inside the phantom tank filled with chicken muscle tissue paste and chicken tissue. A 1 mA, 50 kHz sinusoidal current was injected at the phantom boundary and the boundary potentials are measured using opposite current injection protocol. Resistivity images were reconstructed from the boundary data using Electrical Impedance and Diffuse Optical Reconstruction Software (EIDORS) and the reconstruction was evaluated by calculating the contrast parameters of the images. Results show that the resistivity of the chicken fat is successfully reconstructed with a proper background resistivity. Impedance spectroscopic studies show that the chicken tissue phantom can be suitably used to evaluate a multifrequency EIT system.

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