Optimal tissue types in the thoracic electrical impedance model for thoracic electrical bioimpedance (TEB) studies.

In this study we have identified the tissues required to be included in the thoracic electrical impedance model for studies relating to impedance cardiography. This is a useful finding, as it expedites and simplifies the segmentation process when employed to construct digital human models from a set of magnetic resonance or computed tomography images. Laplace equations with inhomogeneous boundary conditions were solved within an anatomically accurate thorax model. When the number of tissue types in the model was reduced to only 7 (i.e. blood, fat, liver, lung, muscle, skin and bone) the calculations indicated a 3.6% error in the result. Addition of internal air reduced the error to as small as 1.3%. Further reductions in the number of tissue types introduced larger errors in the measurement. It was therefore concluded that 8 tissue types are essential to acceptably preserve the computational accuracy while facilitating a simplification of the segmentation process.