Study and comparison of different Machine Learning-based approaches to solve the inverse problem in Electrical Impedance Tomographies

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive technique used to obtain the electrical internal conductivity distribution from the interior of bodies. This is a promising method from the manufacturing viewpoint, since it could be used to estimate different physical inner body properties during the production of goods. Nevertheless, this technique requires dealing with an inverse problem that makes its usage in real-time processes challenging. Recently, Machine Learning techniques have been proposed to solve the inverse problem accurately. However, the majority of prior research is focused on qualitative results, and they typically lack a systematic methodology to determine the optimal hyperparameters appropriately. This work presents a systematic comparison of six popular Machine Learning algorithms: Artificial Neural Network, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors, Elastic Net, Ada Boost, and Gradient Boosting. Particularly, the last two algorithms were based on decision tree learners. Furthermore, we studied the relationship between model performance and different EIT configurations. Specifically, we analyzed whether the measurement pattern and the number of used electrodes could increase the model performance. Experiments revealed that tree-based models present high performance, even better than Neural Networks, the most widely-used Machine Learning model to deal with EIT. Experiments also showed a model performance improvement when the EIT configuration was optimized. Most favorable metrics were attained using the tree-based Gradient Boosting model with a combination of both adjacent and mono measurement patterns as well as with 32 electrodes deployed during the tomographic process. With this particular setting, we achieved an accuracy of 99.14% detecting internal artifacts and a Root Mean Square Error of 4.75 predicting internal conductivity distributions.