Focused Current Density Imaging Using Internal Electrode in Magnetic Resonance Electrical Impedance Tomography (MREIT)

Magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) is an imaging modality capable of visualizing cross-sectional current density and/or conductivity distributions inside an electrically conducting object. It uses an MRI scanner to measure one component of the magnetic flux density induced by an externally injected current through a pair of surface electrodes. For the cases of deep brain stimulation (DBS), electroporation, and radio frequency (RF) ablation, internal electrodes can be used to improve the quality of the MREIT images. In this paper, we propose a new MREIT imaging method using internal electrodes to visualize a current density distribution within a local region around them. To evaluate its performance, we conducted and analyzed a series of numerical simulations and phantom imaging experiments. We compared the reconstructed current density images using the internal electrodes with the obtained using only the external electrodes. We found that the proposed method using the internal electrodes stably determines the current density in the focused region with better accuracy.