Design and development of instrumentation for acquiring electrical impedance tomography data

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) has its applications in several areas like medical imaging, process tomography, geophysical mapping of earth's crust and non destructive testing. Every application of EIT demands specific requirements from the instrumentation which is used to gather surface potential data from the object to be inspected. Key issues regarding design and choice of instrumentation are discussed in this paper. A data acquisition system for EIT is designed, developed and tested for certain conductivity range and adjacent excitation adjacent measurement strategies. The preliminary results show agreement with the reported data. The simple and low cost hardware developed in this work is useful for acquiring complete data set required for image reconstruction in EIT. The discussion regarding key issues in designing EIT instrumentation will be useful while developing any new application of EIT.