Fully Parallel Electrical Impedance Tomography Using Code Division Multiplexing

Abstract

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has been dominated by the use of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) as methods of achieving orthogonal injection of excitation signals. Code Division Multiplexing (CDM), presented in this paper is an alternative that eliminates temporal data inconsistencies of TDM for fast changing systems. Furthermore, this approach eliminates data inconsistencies that arise in FDM when frequency bands of current injecting electrodes are chosen over frequencies that have large changes in the imaged object's impedance. To the authors knowledge no fully functional wideband system or simulation platform using simultaneous injection of Gold codes currents has been reported. In this paper, we formulate, simulate and develop a fully functional pseudo-random (Gold) code driven EIT system with 15 excitation currents and 16 separate voltage measurement electrodes. In the work we verify the use of CDM as a multiplexing modality in simultaneous injection EIT, using a prototype system with an overall bandwidth of 15 kHz, and attainable speed of 462 frames/s using codes with a period of 31 chips. Simulations and experiments are performed using the Electrical Impedance and Diffuse Optics Reconstruction Software (EIDORS). We also propose the use of image processing on reconstructed images to establish their quality quantitatively without access to raw reconstruction data. The results of this study show that CDM can be successfully used in EIT, and gives results of similar visual quality to TDM and FDM. Achieved performance shows average position error of 3.5% and size error of 6.2%.