Sensitivity analysis of the complete electrode model for electrical impedance tomography

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is an imaging technique that reconstructs the conductivity distribution in the interior of an object using electrical measurements from the electrodes that are attached around the boundary. The Complete Electrode Model (CEM) accurately incorporates the electrode size, shape, and effective contact impedance into the forward problem for EIT. In this work, the effect of the conductivity distribution and the electrode contact impedance on the solution of the forward problem is addressed. In particular, the sensitivity of the electric potential with respect to a small-amplitude perturbation in the conductivity, and with respect to some defective electrodes is studied. The Gateaux derivative is introduced as a tool for the sensitivity analysis and the Gateaux differentiability of the electric potential with respect to the conductivity and to the contact impedance of the electrodes is proved. The derivative is then expressed as the unique solution to a variational problem and the discretization is performed with Finite Elements of type P1. Numerical simulations for different 2D and 3D configurations are presented. This study illustrates the impact of the presence of perturbations in the parameters of CEM on EIT measurements. Finally, the 2D inverse conductivity problem for EIT is numerically solved for some configurations and the results confirm the conclusions of the numerical sensitivity analysis.