Technical note: Multi-receiver combination method for phase-based electrical property tomography of the breast

Abstract

Background: Phase-based electrical property tomography (EPT) is a technique that allows conductivity reconstruction with only phase of the B-1 field under the assumption that the magnitude of the B-1 fields are homogeneous. The more this assumption is violated, the less accurate the reconstructed conductivity. Thus, a method that ensures homogeneity of |B-1(-)| field is important for breast image using multi-receiver coil. PurposeTo develop a method for multi-receiver combination for phase-based EPT usable for breast EPT imaging in the clinic.,Methods: Theory of the proposed method is presented. To validate the proposed method, the phantom and in-vivo experiments were conducted. Conductivity images were reconstructed using the transceive phase of the combined image and results were compared with another combination method.,Results: The proposed method's conductivity results were more stable than those of the previous method when |B-1(-)| was not homogeneous and when the homogeneous contrast region was small. The phantom and in-vivo results indicate that the proposed method produces improved conductivity images than the previous method. The proposed combination method also increased the conductivity contrast between benign and cancerous tissues.,Conclusion: The proposed method produced more stable multi-receiver combination for phase-based EPT of the breast in a clinical environment.,