A novel deep neural network method for electrical impedance tomography

Image reconstruction for Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a highly nonlinear and ill-posed inverse problem. It requires the design and employment of feasible reconstruction methods capable to guarantee trustworthy image generation. Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have a powerful ability to express complex nonlinear functions. This research paper introduces a novel framework based on DNN aiming to achieve EIT image reconstruction. The proposed DNN model, comprises of the following two layers, namely: The Stacked Autoencoder (SAE) and the Logistic Regression (LR). It is trained using the large lab samples which are obtained by the COMSOL simulation software (a cross platform finite elements analysis solver). The relationship between the voltage measurement and the internal conductivity distribution is determined. The untrained voltage measurement samples are used as input to the trained DNN, and the output is an estimate for image reconstruction of the internal conductivity distribution. The results show that the proposed model can achieve reliable shape and size reconstruction. When white Gaussian noise with a signal-to-noise ratio of 30, 40 and 50 were added to test set, the proposed DNN structure still has good imaging results, which proved the anti-noise capability of the network. Furthermore, the network that was trained using simulation data sets, would be applied for the EIT image reconstruction based on the experimental data that were produced after preprocessing.