A Development Of Electrode Probes For Imaging Precancerous Lesions With Electrical Impedance Tomography Technique: A Phantom Study

Napatsawan Ngamdi; Jaruwan Sriwilai; Therdkiat Trongwongsa; Taweechai  Ouypornkochagorn

doi:10.6180/jase.202401_27(1).0006

A Development Of Electrode Probes For Imaging Precancerous Lesions With Electrical Impedance Tomography Technique: A Phantom Study

Chemical Engineering Chemistry / Biochemistry

Napatsawan Ngamdi¹, Jaruwan Sriwilai², Therdkiat Trongwongsa², and Taweechai Ouypornkochagorn^{1This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.}

¹Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Srinakharinwirot University, Thailand
²Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, Srinakharinwirot University, Thailand

Received: January 23, 2023
Accepted: April 15, 2023
Publication Date: May 3, 2023

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202401_27(1).0006

Cervical abnormality screening can reduce the risk of getting cancer. Screening methods mostly depend on laboratory investigation which requires equipment, time, and pathologist experience. Electrical bioimpedance has been reported that can be used to identify the presence of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) since the conductivity of CIN could be 4-5 times higher than that of normal tissue. In this study, an electrode probe having 8 round electrodes is developed with 1.5 mm-electrode distance. Tissue conductivity can be directly estimated with the probe based on the four-point measurement method, and the image of conductivity distribution can be reconstructed at the same time. The simulation result showed that when tissue thickness was thicker than 4 mm, the commonly-used formula for estimating conductivity is applicable regardless of the electrode shape, but a correction factor was needed with a value up to 1.2 when the thickness was down to 1 mm. The localization performance of the reconstruction images was investigated in a phantom experiment – on a piece of sausage with a burning spot on the surface. Five current excitations were performed from 2 kHz to 125 kHz. The burning surface could be located with a localization error of 0.23 mm with a frequency higher than 2 kHz. However, artifacts were still observable in the images at the boundary region of the electrode array. Thus, increasing the number of electrodes and increasing the probe tip area or decreasing the electrode diameter are still recommended.

Keywords: Electrode probe; Cervical precancerous tissues; Reconstruction; Tissue conductivity

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