Magneto-Acousto-Electrical Tomography With Magnetic Induction for Conductivity Reconstruction

Magneto-acousto-electrical tomography (MAET) is an imaging modality proposed to conduct noninvasive electrical conductivity imaging of biological tissue with high spatial resolution. In this study, we present a method of MAET in coil detection mode, which is named as magneto-acousto-electrical tomography with magnetic induction (MAET-MI). Based on the analysis of the mechanism of MAET-MI, we derive a reciprocal theorem and give an integral equation for computing the induced voltage of the coil. The forward problem of MAET-MI can be solved by this integral equation. In the inverse problem of MAET-MI, two steps are taken to reconstruct the conductivity. The first step is to reconstruct the curl of the eddy current density in the reciprocal process by the compression sensing method. And then the conductivity is recovered by the iterative methods such as the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. Both the mechanism of MAET-MI and the reconstruction of conductivity are verified by computer simulations. We have also conducted the phantom experiments. The reconstructed images are approximately consistent with the phantom's conductivity. The imaging results prove the ability and the reliability of our proposed methods. It is shown that the relative conductivity distribution can be reconstructed with our proposed reciprocal theorem in MAET-MI modality. Comparing with the traditional MAET, The MAET-MI modality would benefit from the noncontact measurement and be convenient for clinical application.