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Electrical impedance tomography device and process

  • US 9,730,607 B2
  • Filed: 06/12/2012
  • Issued: 08/15/2017
  • Est. Priority Date: 07/02/2011
  • Status: Active Grant
First Claim
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1. An electrical impedance tomography (EIT) device comprising:

  • a plurality of electrodes, which can be placed on a body;

    control and measuring circuits to feed alternating current or alternating voltage to said electrodes and to receive voltage or current signals received from said electrodes as measured signals;

    a control unit connected to said control and measuring circuits and configured to control a supply of alternating current or with an alternating voltage to an electrode pair as a feeding electrode pair and configured to receive measured voltage signal or measured current signal of each electrode pair from all other electrode pairs as measured signals, and to successively change said feeding electrode pair through said plurality of electrodes and to receive and to process the measured signals (U1, . . . , UM) of a plurality of (M) individual measuring channels (K1, . . . , KM) and to reconstruct therefrom an impedance distribution of the body with a reconstruction algorithm, said control unit further configured to continuously determine at least one property (eα

    1, . . . , eα

    M) of a set (α

    ) of properties to determine channel-specific quality parameters (q1, . . . , qM) by a comparison of said at least one property of each channel with predetermined desired values, the properties comprising signal-to-noise ratio of the measured signals, freak value of the measured signals, mean value of the measured signals, phase or real and imaginary part of the measured signals, crosstalk of the measured signals, common mode of the measured signals reciprocity of the measured signals, measured signal drifts, current feed fluctuations, and value and phase of the electrode-skin contact impedances, each from said measured signals (U1, . . . , UM) of all measuring channels and configured to correct measured signals of said measuring channels based on said at least one property by adapting the reconstruction algorithm based on the at least one property by including the channel-specific quality parameters (q1, . . . , qM) among channel-specific properties in the reconstruction algorithm in a matrix that comprises a weighting matrix W(q1, . . . , qM) that comprises the channel-specific quality parameters (q1, . . . , qM), whereinsaid control unit furthermore determines at least another property so as to determine N properties emα

    (UM)(α

    =1, . . . , N) of the set (α

    ) of properties in all measuring channels for each measured signal (U1, . . . UM) and compares the N properties with desired values or with desired ranges esollmα

    determined in advance or with both the desired values and with the desired ranges determined in advance, to provide results of a comparison, and corrects the measured signals of the measuring channels based on the results of the comparison based on the properties or adapts the reconstruction algorithm based on the properties;

    said control unit determines channel-specific quality parameters and property-specific quality parameters qmα

    (emα

    , esollmα

    ) from the comparison of the determined properties emα

    of each channel m=1, . . . , M with desired values or desired value ranges esollmα

    determined in advance, wherein the channel-specific quality parameters are included in the reconstruction algorithm in such a manner that measuring channels with channel-specific quality parameters that are indicative of signals of a lower quality relative to other signals are weighted less strongly than measuring channels with quality parameters that are indicative of signals with a higher quality relative to other signals; and

    said control unit forms each of the channel-specific quality parameters from the property-specific quality parameters qmα

    (emα

    , esollmα

    ), to provide the channel-specific quality parameters qm(q11, . . . , qmα

    , . . . , qMN), by arithmetic or geometric averaging of the property-specific quality parameters qmα

    (emα

    , esollmα

    ) for each measuring channel, wherein the channel-specific quality parameters are standardized for an interval, wherein the lowest quality is assigned to the value 0 and the highest quality is assigned to the value 1, and wherein the measuring channels are weighted according to this standardized quality parameter in the reconstruction algorithm.

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