Inclusion boundary reconstruction and sensitivity analysis in electrical impedance tomography

Reconstruction of conductive inclusions in a homogeneous background medium is commonly seen in electrical impedance tomography (EIT). One of the methods to deal with the inclusion reconstruction problems is the shape-based method. With prior knowledge of conductivity of target inclusions, the boundary of inclusions is parameterized by several shape coefficients and recovered from EIT measurements. This paper presents a shape-based inclusion reconstruction method and its numerical implementation with boundary element method (BEM). A shape perturbation method (SPM) is proposed to calculate the shape sensitivity in EIT. To evaluate the accuracy of the presented method, a series of numerical tests are conducted. The characteristics of EIT shape sensitivity are analysed. Some factors influencing the reconstruction performance are discussed.