Abstract

Recent developments in D-bar reconstruction methods for 2D EIT have established a methodology for the inclusion of spatial priors, which have been shown to provide improved quality and stability of images. In the context of medical imaging, these techniques begin with prior estimates of organ boundaries within the plane of the electrodes, to which optimized conductivity guesses are assigned. In previous works, the methodology for approximating organ boundaries has involved manually extracting boundaries from prior medical scans, which may not be readily available in practice. This protocol is also highly labor intensive, and has the potential to introduce human bias. Furthermore, in previous works, some of the sharpness provided by the introduction of priors was lost due to a mathematical need for smoothing of the conductivity distribution. In this presentation, we address these problems via (1) a method for the automated selection of boundaries via machine learning techniques, and (2) use of an alternative mathematical formulation which eliminates the need for smoothing. We present results from numerically simulated thoracic phantoms on circular domains.