Research Article Exploratory Study on the Methodology of Fast Imaging of Unilateral Stroke Lesions by Electrical Impedance Asymmetry in Human Heads

Copyright © 2014 Jieshi Ma et al.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative CommonsAttribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Stroke has a high mortality and disability rate and should be rapidly diagnosed to improve prognosis. Diagnosing stroke is not a problem for hospitals with CT,MRI, and other imaging devices but is difficult for community hospitals without these devices. Based on the mechanism that the electrical impedance of the two hemispheres of a normal human head is basically symmetrical and a stroke can alter this symmetry, a fast electrical impedance imaging method called symmetrical electrical impedance tomography (SEIT) is proposed. In this technique, electrical impedance tomography (EIT) data measured from the undamaged craniocerebral hemisphere (CCH) is regarded as reference data for the remaining EIT data measured from the other CCH for difference imaging to identify the differences in resistivity distribution between the two CCHs. The results of SEIT imaging based on simulation data from the 2D human head finite elementmodel and that from the physical phantom of human head verified thismethod in detection of unilateral stroke. 1