Mathematical modeling of mechanical vibration assisted conductivity imaging

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical model for a novel vibration-assisted conductivity imaging technique that improves sensitivity and image quality without needing prior reference data, with applications in breast imaging and anomaly detection.

Contribution

It introduces a new multi-physics framework for conductivity imaging that incorporates mechanical vibrations, enhancing contrast sensitivity and image reconstruction without prior reference data.

Findings

Mechanical vibrations increase data sensitivity to conductivity contrasts.

The method improves image quality and anomaly detection accuracy.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

This paper aims at mathematically modeling a new multi-physics conductivity imaging system incorporating mechanical vibrations simultaneously applied to an imaging object together with current injections. We perturb the internal conductivity distribution by applying time-harmonic mechanical vibrations on the boundary. This enhances the effects of any conductivity discontinuity on the induced internal current density distribution. Unlike other conductivity contrast enhancing frameworks, it does not require a prior knowledge of a reference data. In this paper, we provide a mathematical framework for this novel imaging modality. As an application of the vibration-assisted impedance imaging framework, we propose a new breast image reconstruction method in electrical impedance tomography (EIT). As its another application, we investigate a conductivity anomaly detection problem and provide an efficient location search algorithm. We show both analytically and numerically that the applied mechanical vibration increases the data sensitivity to the conductivity contrast and enhances the quality of reconstructed images and anomaly detection results. For numerous applications in impedance imaging, the proposed multi-physics method opens a new difference imaging area called the vibration-difference imaging, which can augment the time-difference and also frequency-difference imaging methods for sensitivity improvements.