A New Method for Electrical Impedance Tomography With Incomplete Electrode Array

The possibility to design wearable devices based on electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has recently given a boost to this technology. However, the coverage of the sensor array will vary with the size difference of the measured object, resulting in an incomplete measurement set. If this measurement set is directly invested in the solution of the inverse problem, the imaging quality will be significantly degraded. In this case, it is necessary to take measures to reduce the impact of missing measurement data on reconstruction. In this article, a new method (MinR-DFF) is proposed which provides a novel solution to the problem of local measurement information loss due to incomplete electrode arrays and achieves high-quality image reconstruction. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical simulation and solid–liquid two-phase experiments. By using this method, the correct images of the phantoms are successfully recovered with an incomplete electrode array and both the correlation coefficients (CORs) and the relative errors (REs) do not differ from the results using the complete measurement set by more than 5%.