Anatomical Atlas of the Human Head for Electrical Impedance Tomography

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a technique that can be used to estimate resistivity distribution from the inside of a domain based on surface measurements. This could be useful, for example, in the diagnosis of cerebral strokes. However, a method to acquire EIT images of the head with enough quality to achieve this task is still needed. In this work, an automated method for the calculation of a statistical atlas of the human head is presented to be used as prior information for the ill-posed inverse problem associated to EIT. Fifty magnetic resonance images of healthy subjects were used for this purpose. Numerical simulations using a realistic head model with hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke were used to evaluate its effect. The results show that, when the atlas was used, there was a decrease in the root mean square error of the images obtained. Also, some artifacts observed in the image generated without the use of the atlas were eliminated or diminished. These findings hint to the possibility of using a statistical atlas of the head to improve the quality of EIT images.