Development of a fiber optic device to monitor thoracic shape and excursion in real-time for Electrical Impedance Tomography
Electrical Impedance Tomography(EIT) is a non-invasive medical imaging method capable of high temporal resolution from inside biological systems. One factor that can influence the spatial resolution obtained from the image is the patient chest shape information. Once this is related to the boundary conditions of it’s model. The main objective of this work is to propose and create a device to measure the chest shape and incorporated it into the EIT method. The device was built using a rubber strap in which was coupled the light source, an optical fiber guide, photodiode placed over the strap length to measure the scape light from the fiber and the necessary instrumentation to collect the signals from the photodiode. So far different fiber wear, sensor fixation and light source techniques have been used to find a configuration that would allow a correlation curve to be obtained between the fiber attenuation coefficient and the belt curvature. With a configuration that met the restrictions, the strap was placed on several cylindrical surfaces with a known radius and the voltages on the photodiodes were collected. The data were processed and the fiber attenuation coefficient behavior as a function of the curvature was obtained. In the following work, the fiber attenuation coefficient function will be used as a way to determine the local curvature of each strap photodiode and using interpolations the shape of the surface to which the strap is overlapping will be determined.