| Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a medical imaging technique in which diagnostic electrical current is driven into a body and surface electrical voltages are measured in order to reconstruct an image of the conductivity or permittivity of the body. EIT is categorized as a soft-field tomographic method because the current propagates in a 3D domain even if the electrodes are located in a plane. In addition, the current injection source has a 3D geometry in practice which implies 3D considerations. However, accurately solving the 3D problem employing Finite Element Method (FEM) needs a great number of elements leading to a large computational complexity.;1www.eidors.org (http://eidors3d.sourceforge.net).;The goal of this work is to develop and test a 2½D finite element method algorithm for the EIT problem which will reduce the memory and computation required. The goal of a 2½D FEM is to solve the 3D problem by solving a set of modified 2D problems instead. In this work, a 2½D finite element solver is implemented considering the complete electrode model (GEM). For this purpose, complimentary modules are developed to enhance the EIDORS 1 project by the 2½D FEM. In addition, the boundary current injection is calculated, the algorithm is validated and the time and memory performance is evaluated. Finally, the number of 2½D equations to be solved for a given accuracy is investigated and an explanation is also provided for improving the speed of the algorithm. |
