Electrical impedance tomography of cell viability in tissue with application to cryosurgery.

Tissue damage that is associated with the loss of cell membrane integrity should alter the bulk electrical properties of the tissue. This study shows that electrical impedance tomography (EIT) should be able to detect and image necrotic tissue inside the body due to the permeabilization of the membrane to ions. Cryosurgery, a minimally invasive surgical procedure that uses freezing to destroy undesirable tissue, was used to investigate the hypothesis. Experimental results with liver tissue demonstrate that cell damage during freezing results in substantial changes in tissue electrical properties. Two-dimensional EIT simulations of liver cryosurgery, which employ the experimental data, demonstrate the feasibility of this application.