1.

0.5

0.5

1.5
1.5 1 0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5

Figure 1: A typical sensor geometry indicating radial fins, screen and vessel wall

4 Electrical Capacitance Tomography

4.1 Introduction
Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) attempts to image to permittivity in the
interior of an object from external capacitance measurement. Mathematically it is
the inverse conductivity (EIT or ERT) problem. The electric potential satisfies

0

where is the permittivity. A typical sensor consists of an array of rectangular

electrodes rolled into a cylinder. This fits as a sleeve over a pipe which contains
a mixture of two or three components which are under investigation. Each of the

drive electrodes in turn is set to some fixed potential, the others set to zero, while
the total charge n is measured on each of the remaining electrodes. There
is a cylindrical screen around the electrode array set to zero potential, and the
gap between filled with either air or epoxy resin of a known permittivity. There
may also be radial screens between the electrodes between the electrodes and the
external screen to reduce the exterior capacitive coupling between the electrodes.
Figure 5.1 indicates a typical geometry.

The discrete version of the Dirichlet to Neumann mapping is the trans-capacitance

on each electrode and Q is the vector Qk

matrix C, which satisfies Q CV , where V is a vector of the potentials specified
Ek n dS (where Ek is the kth

1
 1.5

0.5

0.5

1.5
1.5 1 0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5

Figure 2: A typical finite element mesh for the ECT sensor generated using the
EIDORS ECT package and QMG

electrode). The trans-capacitance C Ci Ce is the sum of the interior and any
wall of the pipe Ci , and known and fixed exterior capacitance Ce .
Permittivities of commonly encountered materials vary by a factor of about 3,
and in many practical situations there are known upper and lower bounds. This
means that the well known logarithmic stability estimates apply.

4.2 Forward Problem

As the electrodes are relatively long, for approximately axi-symmetric objects
a 2-dimensional approximation agrees well with measured data. For an initial
approximation in which the permittivity inside the pipe is taken to be constant,
the electric potential can be calculated from using separation of variables. If a
non-linear iterative algorithm is used (for larger permittivity contrasts), the finite
element method can be employed to solve the forward problem. We used the
EIDORS 2D toolbox [1] to construct a forward solution, see Figure 5.2.

2
4.3 Regularized solutions


We repressent the permittivity as a piecewise constand function on a square or
triangular mesh. The Jacobian J dC d is readilly calculated
ij
Jk


Ci j k i j dA
Pk

where Pk is the kth mesh element (pixel),k the permittivity of that pixel and i is
the potential when electrode i is driven.
For a single linear step, or a difference image between two measurements of
capacitance, we need a regularized solution to
J

C
The traditional approach to this taken in ECT is to use Landwebers iteration as
a regularized inversion procedure [3]. It is interesting that the first iteration of
Landweber, which has rather confusingly been called linear back projection in
the ECT literature, can sometimes produce useful images.
Landwebers algorithm for any number of iterations, like Tikhonov or any
filter of the singular value decomposition (see Bertero and Boccacci [7]) can be
implemented to run almost as fast as one iteration of Landweber, once the SVD
of J has been calculated. However the projected Landweber method [7] incorpo-
rating prior upper and lower bounds on has been found to work well in ECT,
and has no such acceleration. Fast imaging is often desirable in ECT as the data
collection rate can be for example 50 frames per second for a 12 electrode system.
A reconstruction of an object covering six neighbouring triangles, and the
graphical user interface for the EIDORS ECT system is shown in Figure 5.3.
When there are larger permittivity contrasts, an example being mixtures of
oil, air and water where the ratio may be as high as 30, nonlinear reconstruction
methods must be employed. The approach we have taken is to minimize
   
C  C   2
2 L 2

with respect to . Here C is the measured capacitance, is a regularization pa-

rameter and L a smoothing prior, typically an approximation to the Laplacian. The
iterative algorithm, once a best fitting constant value of permittivity 0 has been
found, proceeds to update the permittivity
i  1

i i
where

JiT Ji 2 LT L
i
JiT  C  C   2 LT Li

3
 1
1.5

0.95

0.9

0.5

0.85

0
0.8

0.5
0.75

1
0.7

1.5
1.5 1 0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5

Figure 3: The graphical user interface for EIDORS ECT, showing a reconstruction
from simulated data

For the two dimensional approximation there is a non-iterative algorithm pro-

posed by by Nachman [4] which does not rely linearization. It is not yet clear how
the algorithms behaves with real data but it is certainly worth further attention.

4.4 Estimation of concentration

Often where there is a mixture of two materials, for example air and polypropylene
spherical beads, the effective permittivity lies between the permittivity of the two
components. If the concentration is relatively low and away from the measuring
electrodes an approximation such as the Maxwell-Wagner formula can be used to
estimate the concentration. Other empirical formulae have been used with some
success [6].
If the total volume fraction is required this might prove a useful application of
the estimates of Alessandini et al [5], although this has not yet been tried.

References
[1] M. Vauhkonen, W.R.B. Lionheart, L.M. Heikkinen, P.J. Vauhkonen and J.P.
Kaipio, A Matlab Toolbox for the EIDORS project to reconstruct two- and

4
 three-dimensional EIT images, Proceedings of Conference on Biomedical
Applications of Electrical Impedance Tomography, University College Lon-
don, April 5 - 7, 2000. See also
 
 


 !#" .

[2] See the website
!$!#%"&(')&*+,!- for details of this apparatus.

[3] W.Q. Yang, D.M. Spink, T.A. York, H. McCann, An image-reconstruction

algorithm based on Landwebers iteration method for electrical-capacitance
tomography, Meas. Sci. Tech. , 1999, 10, pp.1065-1069

[4] S Siltanen, J Mueller and D Isaacson, An implementation of the reconstruc-

tion algorithm of A Nachman for the 2D inverse conductivity problem, In-
verse Problems, 2000, 16, 681-699

[5] G Alessandrini, E Rosset, JK Seo, Optimal size estimates for the inverse
conductivity problem with one measurement, Proc. Amer Math. Soc 2000,
Vol.128, pp.53-64

[6] W.Q. Yang and M. Byars, An Improved Normalisation Approach for Electri-
cal Capacitance Tomography, Proc 1st World Congress on Industrial Process
Tomography, Buxton, Derbyshire, 1999, pp215-218

[7] M Bertero and P Boccacci, Introduction to Inverse Problems in Imaging,

IOP, Bristol 1998.