A review on electrical impedance tomography for pulmonary perfusion imaging

Although electrical impedance tomography (EIT) for ventilation monitoring is on the verge of clinical trials, pulmonary perfusion imaging with EIT remains a challenge, especially in spontaneously breathing subjects. In anticipation of more research on this subject, we believe a thorough review is called for. In this paper, findings related to the physiological origins and electrical characteristics of this signal are summarized, highlighting properties that are particularly relevant to EIT. The perfusion impedance change signal is significantly smaller in amplitude compared with the changes due to ventilation. Therefore, the hardware used for this purpose must be more sensitive and more resilient to noise. In previous works, some signal- or image-processing methods have been required to separate these two signals. Three different techniques are reviewed in this paper, including the ECG-gating method, frequency-domain-filtering-based methods and a principal-component-analysis-based method. In addition, we review a number of experimental studies on both human and animal subjects that employed EIT for perfusion imaging, with promising results in the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism (PE) and pulmonary arterial hypertension as well as other potential applications. In our opinion, PE is most likely to become the main focus for perfusion EIT in the future, especially for heavily instrumented patients in the intensive care unit (ICU).