Electrical Impedance Tomography System

based on
Active Electrodes
Pascal Olivier Gaggero, Andy Adler, Josef Brunner and Peter Seitz

2016/07/07
Nguyen Xuan Tien
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 Content
1. Introduction.

2. Hardware Design.
2.1. General Consideration.
2.2. Sensor Belt Connector.
2.3. Central Current Source.
2.4. Active Electrode.
2.5. Electrode Belt.

3. Testing.

4. Discussion.

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 Introduction
1. What is EIT?
 Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) produces images of the conductivity within
a body from electrical stimulations and measurements at electrodes placed on the
body surface.
 EIT provides tomographic information without exposing to radiation.

2. Why active electrodes, not passive ones?

 Reduce the sensitivity to electromagnetic perturbation.
 Reduce the need for active and/or passive shielding.
 Stabilize the input impedance of each electrode.
 Reduce the number of cables running from the patient to the main electronics.

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 Introduction
Illustration:

Figure 1. Electrode

Figure 2.
Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) images in a healthy
individual and in a patient subjected to pneumonectomy
(inspiration, expiration, and variability images).

Source: Paper “Electrical impedance tomography in acute lung injury”, J. Riera, P.J. Riu, P. Casan, J.R. Masclans

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 Hardware Design
General Consideration

Figure 3. General concept of the designed active electrode-based EIT system.

• The graphical user interface (GUI) running on a PC computer is connected to the EIT
instrument via an Ethernet connection.
• The EIT instrument itself is provided with control and signal processing unit, integrated
in the so-called SBC.
• The SBC communicates with the active electrode belt using a bus system.
• Each active electrode is connected to a passive electrode which makes contact with the
body, such that the high impedance signal path is less than 5 cm.

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 Sensor Belt Connector (SBC)
Main functions:
• Analog signal acquisition.
• Excitation current generation.
• Active electrode node network
management.
• Communication and data exchange
with the user interface over an
Ethernet port.

Figure 4. Implementation of the acquisition chain and signal generator on the SBC.

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 Sensor Belt Connector (SBC)
Analog signal acquisition chain composes:
• A differential amplifier with a gain Gd = 10.
• An active high pass (HP) filter designed to filter out the direct current (dc) component of
the incoming signal without compromising the settling time excessively.
• Second amplifier is to adjust the signal to the right scale to fit the ADC input range.
• The signal is converted into a differential signal, using a fully differential amplifier
configured to implement an active low pass (LP) filter function to avoid aliasing.

Figure 5. Implementation of the acquisition chain and signal generator on the SBC.

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 Sensor Belt Connector (SBC)
Implement sinusoidal signal generator:
• A FPGA-based numerically controlled oscillator (NCO) which generates a sine signal.
• After leaving the DAC, the signal is filtered with a passive band pass filter to suppress dc
and high-frequency components.
• Then, the signal is fed into an amplifier (Gain Gc), which can be chosen to fit the current
amplitude needed.
• The symmetrical current source is implemented using a voltage to current converter circuit.

Figure 6. Implementation of the acquisition chain and signal generator on the SBC.

FPGA generates clock signal for the operation of digital part of the node network.

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 Central Current Source
• It’s a modified version of the Howland circuit.
• Need a tightly matching of resistors: R2/R1=R4/R5
• Use a commanded voltage source to ‘actively’ sink
the current and balance the injection voltage.

• C4 // R to dampen high frequency signal

components in order to prevent oscillation.
• C1, C2, C3 are placed in the current source circuit
to avoid the undesired injection of dc into the body.

Figure 7. Schematic of the central current source

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 Active Electrode

The operation modes of an active electrode:

• SW1 closed  injecting a current.
• SW2 closed  sinking a current.
• SW3 or SW4 closed  buffering a voltage
and multiplexing the measurement on the
analog lines of the bus using switches.
• All SWs opened  idling while other
electrodes are active.

Figure 8. The overall current

injection and voltage measurement
scheme.

Use a single op-amp configured as a voltage follower to carry out high-impedance voltage
measurements at the electrode.
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 Electrode Belt

a. Active electrode PCB with gold-

plated copper electrode.
b. Active electrodes with micro-
processor, switches and buffer are
connected in a belt-like structure
using FFC cables.
c. Belt-like structure can be
incorporated within a bio-
compatible fabric.
d. Active electrode belt worn by a
male volunteer. Figure 9. Illustration of the developed thoracic-EIT system.

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 Testing
A first qualitative test on a human volunteer.
1  the diaphragm is in a relaxed state.
2  air starts flowing in the lungs through the trachea.
3,4  continue 2’s process until stop taking air.

Figure 10. EIT tomographic images of the

thorax region during one inhalation–
exhalation cycle.

Source Table 1: Paper “Electrical impedance tomography in acute lung injury”, J. Riera, P.J. Riu, P. Casan, J.R. Masclans

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 Discussion
Achievement:
• Successfully demonstrated the use of active electrodes for human thoracic EIT
applications.
• Designing an EIT system is based on compromising several parameters such as the
amount of necessary hardware, the excitation frequency, the contact impedance, the
frame rate and the number of electrodes.
• Experimentally found that considering a fully serial 32 active electrode system with a
working frequency between 80 and 200 kHz and a frame rate between 10 and 30
images per second seems reasonable.

Limitation:
• It was not directly possible to make a comparison between a non-active and an active
EIT system.
• The design is a one-time-use belt cannot reusable.

Future work:
• Minimize hardware of the electronics on each PCB and better integration of the belt bus.
• Create the belts that can be reusable.

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 Thank you!

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