Dominant-Current Deep Learning Scheme for Electrical Impedance Tomography

OBJECTIVE: Deep learning has recently been applied to electrical impedance tomography (EIT) imaging. Nevertheless, there are still many challenges that this approach has to face, e.g., targets with sharp corners or edges cannot be well recovered when using circular inclusion training data. This paper proposes an iterative-based inversion method and a convolutional neural network (CNN) based inversion method to recover some challenging inclusions such as triangular, rectangular, or lung shapes, where the CNN-based method uses only random circle or ellipse training data. METHODS: First, the iterative method, i.e., bases-expansion subspace optimization method (BE-SOM), is proposed based on a concept of induced contrast current (ICC) with total variation regularization. Second, the theoretical analysis of BE-SOM and the physical concepts introduced there motivate us to propose a dominant-current deep learning scheme for EIT imaging, in which dominant parts of ICC are utilized to generate multi-channel inputs of CNN. RESULTS: The proposed methods are tested with both numerical and experimental data, where several realistic phantoms including simulated pneumothorax and pleural effusion pathologies are also considered. CONCLUSIONS AND SIGNIFICANCE: Significant performance improvements of the proposed methods are shown in reconstructing targets with sharp corners or edges. It is also demonstrated that the proposed methods are capable of fast, stable, and high-quality EIT imaging, which is promising in providing quantitative images for potential clinical applications.