Development of electrical impedance tomography of microwave ablation

In this study we assess the feasibility of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) to track the temperature changes during ablation in an ex-vivo ovine liver and in-vivo porcine model. 208 tetrapolar electrical impedance measurements were obtained at 30 frame/s from a 16 electrode EIT system. In the porcine model ventilation artefact was removed by low pass filtering and successful ablation related impedance change image sequences were reconstructed from four of nine liver ablations. This study indicates feasibility of the technique but was limited in the porcine model due to electrode difficulties and the difficulty in positioning the microwave applicator under ultrasound. EIT is more convenient and lower cost than other temperature monitoring methods such as MRI but spatial resolution is constrained by the relatively low number of independent measurements and ill posed reconstruction problem. Future improvements include the use of an internal electrode that could be in practice located on the microwave applicator to provide the reconstruction algorithm with improved prior information and local information of conductivity changes due to ablation.