Static resistivity image of a cubic saline phantom in magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT)

In magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) we inject currents through electrodes placed on the surface of a subject and try to reconstruct cross-sectional resistivity (or conductivity) images using internal magnetic flux density as well as boundary voltage measurements. In this paper we present a static resistivity image of a cubic saline phantom (50 x 50 x 50 mm(3)) containing a cylindrical sausage object with an average resistivity value of 123.7 Omega cm. Our current MREIT system is based on an experimental 0.3 T MRI scanner and a current injection apparatus. We captured MR phase images of the phantom while injecting currents of 28 mA through two pairs of surface electrodes. We computed current density images from magnetic flux density images that are proportional to the MR phase images. From the current density images and boundary voltage data we reconstructed a cross-sectional resistivity image within a central region of 38.5 x 38.5 mm(2) at the middle of the phantom using the J-substitution algorithm. The spatial resolution of the reconstructed image was 64 x 64 and the reconstructed average resistivity of the sausage was 117.7 Omega cm. Even though the error in the reconstructed average resistivity value was small, the relative L-2-error of the reconstructed image was 25.5% due to the noise in measured MR phase images. We expect improvements in the accuracy by utilizing an MRI scanner with higher SNR and increasing the size of voxels scarifying the spatial resolution.