Effect of Excitation-Measurement Pattern of Planar Electrode Array on Detecting Crush Injuries

Crush injuries are an unfortunately common occurrence during natural disasters such as earthquakes. Apart from direct injuries to vital organs such as the brain and heart, crush injuries resulting from compression of the body by collapsed infrastructure are a major cause of fatalities. Therefore, early diagnosis and prompt treatment of crush injury at the disaster scene can reduce mortality. Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a functional imaging technique that reconstructs internal conductivity distribution of a body based on external electrical measurements. Applying different excitation-measurement patterns results in differences in sensitivity and spatial resolution. This paper designs and fabricates a flexible planar sensor array with a rectangular electrode arrangement and proposes two excitation-measurement patterns for it. Tissue-mimicking numerical simulations were performed to evaluate the two patterns in terms of sensitivity index and image reconstruction quality. Additionally, the flexible array with preferred excitation-measurement pattern was experimentally utilized to detect crush injuries in Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats to validate overall feasibility.