Electrical Impedance Tomography is used wherever conductivity contrasts show up and a cheap, fast, non-invasive measurement matters more than fine spatial resolution.
Medical
- Bedside monitoring of lung ventilation and perfusion. This is the most established clinical use: air-filled lung tissue conducts much worse than blood and other tissue.
- Detecting and classifying stroke, monitoring brain activity.
- Breast cancer screening, since tumours often differ in conductivity from healthy tissue.
- Gastric emptying and monitoring of bladder volume.
Industrial and geophysical
- Monitoring multiphase flow in pipes and process tomography of mixing vessels.
- Detecting leaks and corrosion.
- Non-destructive testing of concrete and other structures (damage and crack detection).
- Electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) of the subsurface. It is the same inverse problem with electrodes on the ground surface or in boreholes.
References
- T. K. Bera (2018). Applications of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT): A Short Review. IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 331, 012004. doi:10.1088/1757-899X/331/1/012004
- A. Adler, A. Boyle (2017). Electrical Impedance Tomography: Tissue Properties to Image Measures. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 64(11), 2494–2504. doi:10.1109/TBME.2017.2728323
- D. S. Holder (ed.) (2004). Electrical Impedance Tomography: Methods, History and Applications. CRC Press. doi:10.1201/9781420034462