Singularities of mixed boundary value problems in electrical impedance tomography

The importance of accurate mathematical modelling in the development of image reconstruction algorithms for electrical impedance tomography (EIT) has been discussed in a number of recent papers. It is particularly important in iterative reconstruction schemes where the forward problem of calculating the electric potential from Neumann boundary data is solved many times. One area which needs to be considered it the mathematical modelling of the electrodes used in the technique. In this paper we discuss one of the more sophisticated models which has been proposed and present the results of a number of numerical and analytic calculations which we have made as a contribution to the understanding of this question.