Gold electrode sensors for electrical impedance tomography (EIT) studies

Surface electrodes in EIT phantoms usually reduce the SNR of the boundary data due to their design and development errors. A novel gold electrode array with high geometric precision is developed for 2D electrical impedance tomography to increase the SNR of boundary data. Gold thin films are deposited on a flexible FR4 sheet using electro-deposition process to make a sixteen electrode array with electrodes of identical geometry. Boundary data are collected using a USB based high speed data acquisition system in a LabVIEW platform and the data are compared. Results show that the SNR of the boundary potentials obtained with gold electrode array is higher than that of a stainless steel array. Resistivity images reconstructed using EIDORS showed that the image quality is improved with gold electrode array.