Bioelectrical impedance techniques in medicine. Part III: Impedance imaging. Third section: medical applications.

In several areas of clinical medicine, electrical impedance tomography could offer significant advantages over existing methods. These advantages have been supported by preliminary studies or by validation studies, which are described. The suggested applications are reviewed in this section. They mainly concern developments in impedance variations on brain, lung (neonatal, edema, emphysema), and heart; changes in blood volume, gastrointestinal system (gastric emptying, gastroesophageal reflux, pharyngeal transit time); pelvis (pelvis congestion); and thermal mapping in hyperthermia and breast (tissue characterization). The conductivity information at one frequency in a pixel is insufficient to take into account the very complex physiological mechanisms that underlie the observed impedance changes. To gain a better understanding of these mechanisms, research is currently being carried out on imaging of the imaginary part, parametric imaging, spectroscopic imaging, and 3D imaging, which are developed at the end of this section.