title: Comparison of total variation algorithms for electrical impedance tomography.
abstract: The applications of total variation (TV) algorithms for electrical impedance tomography (EIT) have been investigated. The use of the TV regularisation technique helps to preserve discontinuities in reconstruction, such as the boundaries of perturbations and sharp changes in conductivity, which are unintentionally smoothed by traditional l2 norm regularisation. However, the non-differentiability of TV regularisation has led to the use of different algorithms. Recent advances in TV algorithms such as the primal dual interior point method (PDIPM), the linearised alternating direction method of multipliers (LADMM) and the spilt Bregman (SB) method have all been demonstrated successful EIT applications, but no direct comparison of the techniques has been made. Their noise performance, spatial resolution and convergence rate applied to time difference EIT were studied in simulations on 2D cylindrical meshes with different noise levels, 2D cylindrical tank and 3D anatomically head-shaped phantoms containing vegetable material with complex conductivity. LADMM had the fastest calculation speed but worst resolution due to the exclusion of the second-derivative; PDIPM reconstructed the sharpest change in conductivity but with lower contrast than SB; SB had a faster convergence rate than PDIPM and the lowest image errors.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, People's Republic of China. Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK.
authors.forename: Zhou
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Gustavo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Sato dos Santos
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Dowrick
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Avery
authors.forename: Zhaolin
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.forename: Hui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.forename: David S
authors.initials: DS
authors.lastname: Holder
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D017097:Electric Impedance; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D013997:Time Factors; D014054:Tomography