Needle-based electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a crucial modality for the real-time monitoring of irreversible electroporation (IRE) in deep-seated tumors. However, under the conventional adjacent drive pattern, the effective field of view is physically confined within the convex hull of the electrode array due to current constriction, which prevents the assessment of lateral ablation boundaries. Here, we proposed an EIT paradigm integrating a panoramic hybrid transmission topology with spatially adaptive sensitivity compensation (SASC). Guided by the principle of minimum power dissipation, trans-array distal current injection is used to activate fringing fields, which forces current penetration beyond the periphery of the array. Concurrently, the SASC strategy that uses virtual aperture synthesis is developed to counteract the suppression of weak far-field signals inherent in conventional regularization algorithms. Numerical simulations conducted on three circular inclusions with a radius of 2.5 mm (left exterior x = 5 mm, central x = 15 mm, right exterior x = 25 mm) verified that the proposed method distinctly resolves all targets and achieves uniform normalized amplitudes across the panoramic FOV, with the contrast of targets outside the convex hull being comparable to that of the central inclusions. Importantly, the method maintains stable, high-fidelity performance under 30 dB of noise, a level typical of clinical intraoperative environments, and exhibits excellent anti-noise robustness across the entire imaging domain. This approach preserves high central resolution while transforming a localized probe into a panoramic imager and provides a robust technical foundation for real-time assessment of safety boundaries during large-volume IRE ablation.
Zhao et al. (Mon,) studied this question.