Simulation of effects of the electrode structure and material in the density measuring system of the peripheral nerve based on micro-electrical impedance tomography

The electrode structure in micro-electrical impedance tomography (MEIT) highly influences the measurement sensitivity and therefore the reconstructed image quality. Hence, optimizing the electrode structure leads to the improvement of image quality in the reconstruction procedure. Although there have been many investigations on electrical impedance tomography (EIT) electrodes, there is no comprehensive study on their influence on images of the peripheral nerve. In this paper, we present a simulation method to study the effects of the electrode structure in the density measurement system of the peripheral nerve based on MEIT. The influence of the electrode structure such as dimensions, material and the number of electrodes and also the recognition feature of different radii of fascicle and different locations of fascicles has been studied. Data were reconstructed from the real and imaginary parts of complex conductivity data, respectively. It has been shown that the material of the electrodes had no effect on the reconstructed images, while the dimensions of the electrodes significantly affected the image sensitivity and thus the image quality. An increase in the number of electrodes increased the amount of data and information content. However, as the number of electrodes increased due to the given perimeter of the peripheral nerve, the area of the electrodes was reduced. This reduction affects the reconstructed image quality. The real and imaginary parts of the data were separately reconstructed for each case. Although, in real EIT systems, the reconstructed images using the real part of the signal have a better signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), this study proved that for a density measuring system of the peripheral nerve, the reconstructed images using the imaginary part of the signal had better quality. This simulation study proposes the effects of the electrode size and material and obtained spatial resolution that was high enough to reconstruct fascicles in a peripheral nerve.