A new capacitance measurement method for imaging of permittivity distribution

The final purpose of the authors' study is the imaging of changed temperature distribution inside the human head by non-invasive measurement. To achieve this purpose, the authors investigated the imaging of permittivity distribution by measuring capacitance because permittivity depends on temperature and the measurement of capacitance gives one information about permittivity. This paper describes a new capacitance measurement method for estimating the permittivity distribution of an object. A regularization method based on a modified Newton-Raphson method, and the finite element method are used to obtain the imaging of permittivity distribution. The authors present the reconstruction image of an agar-agar placed into a homogeneous phantom. As a result, the authors suggest that it is possible to image permittivity distribution using the proposed new capacitance measurement method.