Accelerated Structure-Aware Sparse Bayesian Learning for Three-Dimensional Electrical Impedance Tomography

In this paper, we consider the reconstruction of three-dimensional (3-D) conductivity distribution using electrical impedance tomography (EIT) technique. A high-resolution and efficient algorithm is developed to solve the EIT inverse problem. The presented algorithm is extended upon a recently proposed novel EIT reconstruction approach based on structure-aware sparse Bayesian learning (SA-SBL). The correlation between proximal layers in the 3-D geometry are incorporated into the structure prior to improve the reconstruction accuracy. In addition, an efficient approach based on approximate message passing is developed to accelerate the large-scale 3-D learning process. To validate the algorithm, numerical experiments using real recorded data are conducted. The visual and quantitative-metric comparisons show that the proposed method outperforms the existing methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy and computational complexity in all test cases. The SA-SBL-based reconstruction approach can preserve the 3-D structure of medical volume, reduce the systematic artifacts, and improve the computational efficiency.