Abstract:

To measure blood flow distributions within the lungs at bedside, Electrical Impedance Tomography measurements based on conductive indicator signals have been recently proposed. The first passage of the indicator signal through the lungs is exploited, but needs to be separated from a superimposed slow drift signal. Two fitting approaches are presented in this paper to accomplish this separation task. The accuracy of estimated first pass signal features is investigated on a synthetic data base. Both algorithms alter the shape of the indicator signal similarly. The algorithms are finally tested on real data from a preclinical porcine study.

Abstract:

The indicator dilution method (IDM) is one approach to measure pulmonary perfusion using Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). To be able to calculate perfu- sion parameters and to increase robustnes, it is necessary to approximate and then to separate the components of the mea- sured signals. The component referring to the passage of the injected bolus through the pixels can be modeled as a gamma variate function, its parameters are often determined using nonlinear optimization algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a linear approach that enables higher robustnes and faster com- putation, and compare the linear and nonlinear fitting approach on data of an animal study.

Abstract:

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a clini- cally used tool for bed-side monitoring of ventilation. Previous work also showed a high potential for lung perfusion moni- toring with indicator-enhanced EIT. However, many research questions have yet to be answered before it can be broadly ap- plied in clinical everyday life. The goal of this work is to eval- uate a new method to improve EIT perfusion measurements. Pulmonary hemodynamic transfer functions were estimated using regularized deconvolution with Tikhonov regularization to estimate spatial perfusion parameters. The final comparison between EIT images and PET scans showed a median corre- lation of 0.897 for the images which were reconstructed using the regularized deconvolution. In comparison the previously used maximum slope method led to a median correlation of 0.868.