A robust image reconstruction algorithm and its parallel implementation in electrical impedance tomography.

An efficient and robust image reconstruction algorithm for static impedance imaging using Hachtel's augmented matrix method was developed. This improved Newton-Raphson method produced more accurate images by reducing the undesirable effects of the ill-conditioned Hessian matrix. It is demonstrated that the electrical impedance tomography (EIT) system could produce two-dimensional static images from a physical phantom with 7% spatial resolution at the center and 5% at the periphery. Static EIT image reconstruction requires a large amount of computation. In order to overcome the limitations on reducing the computation time by algorithmic approaches, the improved Newton-Raphson algorithm was implemented on a parallel computer system. It is shown that the parallel computation could reduce the computation time from hours to minutes.