Evaluation of 3D current injection patterns for human lung monitoring in electrical impedance tomography

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive imaging technique for monitoring the lungs continuously. During EIT Measurements, currents propagate intrinsically in 3D, since electrical current propagates diffusely in the human tissues, so a 2D EIT remains not sufficient to study the out-of-electrodes plane effects on the images. Until now, not enough effort has been made to evaluate the performance of 3D measurement patterns for lung monitoring. In this paper, to investigate 3D current injection patterns for 3D EIT, a 3D model mimicking the geometrical and electrical characteristics of the human thorax has been developed based on Finite Element Method (FEM) along with the Complete Electrode Model (CEM). Simulations have been performed with aligned (“planar,” “zigzag”, “square”, “zigzag opposite”, and “planar opposite”), and offset (“planar offset”, and “zigzag offset”) current injection patterns. Analysis shows the greatest current density diffusion results using the “zigzag opposite” current injection pattern.