A comparison of voltage and sensitivity profiles from two forward problem solvers for three dimensional electrical impedance tomography

Most published work on image reconstruction for Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has concentrated on solving the two dimensional problem. Recently there has been increased interest in addressing the full three dimensional aspects of EIT. One image reconstruction approach for three dimensional EIT is to generate an inverted sensitivity matrix for the imaged volume which, when post multiplied by measured boundary voltage gradients, produces an imaged volume. In order to calculate the sensitivity matrix it is first necessary to solve the appropriate forward problem. This paper compares two methods for generating the solution to the forward problem for a right circular cylinder with eight drive electrodes evenly spaced in a plane around the cylinder, interleaved with eight voltage measurement electrodes. It assesses the implications of these two differing methods on the resulting image reconstruction.