Electrode placement configuration and drive pattern for 3D ERT

Wenru Fan, Huaxiang Wang

School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China fanwenru@tju.edu.cn

ABSTRACT

Electrical resistance tomography (ERT) aims to estimate the electrical properties at the interior of an object from current-voltage measurements on its boundary. Electrode placement for two-dimensional (2D) ERT is typically confined to planar arrangements that match the 2D reconstruction geometry; yet the EIT problem is inherently three-dimensional (3D) as currents cannot be confined to flow in the plane. Therefore, it is necessary to solve ERT problem in 3D. Given the variety of possible 3D electrode placement and drive strategies, it is important to know which ones perform best in a specific application such as lung imaging. In this paper, 2 layers of 24 electrodes are adopted for evaluation in order to balance with the complexity of hardware in practice. This paper investigates two configurations for placing electrodes on a 3D cylindrical medium to reconstruct 3D images. Four different drive patterns are proposed and compared in terms of singular value spectrum, index of voltage measurements and quality of reconstructed images.

Keywords electrical resistance tomography, electrode placement, drive pattern