3-D Electrical Impedance Imaging of Lung Injury

Abstract

Pulmonary edema assessment is a key factor in monitoring and guiding the treatment of critically ill patients. To date, the methods available at the bedside to estimate the physiological correlation of pulmonary edema and extravascular pulmonary fluid are often unreliable or require invasive measurements. The aim of this article is to develop an imaging method of reliably assessing pulmonary edema by utilizing functional electrical impedance tomography. In this article, the Split-Bregman algorithm is used to solve the Total Variation (TV) minimization problem in EIT image reconstruction. A thorax model is constructed according to CT images of rats. Through simulation and experiment, the proposed method improves the quality of reconstructed image significantly compared with existing methods. A pulmonary edema experiment in rats is also carried out. The development of pulmonary edema is analyzed numerically through EIT images.