The complete electrode model for EIT in a mammography geometry.

We have developed an EIT system for simultaneous use in a mammography examination, allowing for highly accurate co-registration between the two modalities. In this pre-clinical study, we investigate the importance of properly modeling the interface between the electrodes and the medium being imaged. We have implemented the complete electrode model for a parallel-plane mammography geometry, in which currents are injected into the medium through two planar sets of electrodes above and below the medium. We make use of the ACT4 device to conduct saline-tank experiments showing the improvement of the complete model over an ave-gap model, which ignores both the conductivity of the electrodes and the surface impedance. The experimental results show an improvement in both forward modeling accuracy and in the quality of the resulting reconstructed images using the complete electrode model, as compared to the ave-gap model.