Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive imaging method in
which an unknown physical body is probed with electric currents applied on the
boundary, and the internal conductivity distribution is recovered from the
measured boundary voltage data. The reconstruction task is a nonlinear and
ill-posed inverse problem, whose solution calls for special regularized
algorithms, such as D-bar methods which are based on complex geometrical optics
solutions (CGOs). In many applications of EIT, such as monitoring the heart and
lungs of unconscious intensive care patients or locating the focus of an
epileptic seizure, data acquisition on the entire boundary of the body is
impractical, restricting the boundary area available for EIT measurements. An
extension of the D-bar method to the case when data is collected only on a
subset of the boundary is studied by computational simulation. The approach is
based on solving a boundary integral equation for the traces of the CGOs using
localized basis functions (Haar wavelets). The numerical evidence suggests that
the D-bar method can be applied to partial-boundary data in dimension two and
that the traces of the partial data CGOs approximate the full data CGO
solutions on the available portion of the boundary, for the necessary small k
frequencies.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figure