An Investigation into the Use and Limitations of Electrical Impedance Mammography as a Clinical Diagnostic Tool

Breast cancer continues to be a leading cause of premature death in women in the western world. This is despite a concerted effort to reduce mortality through the detection of cancers through organised x-ray screening programmes. These efforts are limited in their extent by the specific restrictions on x-ray applicability, such as the age-dependant sensitivity of the technique to breast lesions. This contrasts with the technique of Electrical Impedance Mammography (EIM). Here, through a specialised application of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), tissue is characterised by its multi-frequency response to an injected current. Since the early 198O's EIT has been applied to a number of bodily functions and pathological conditions, such as gastric emptying. Although these applications depend on the detection and imaging of gross changes between a number of temporally separated images. The efficacy of EIM is investigated in terms of the developments, both in hardware and software, necessary to advance the technique to a clinically relevant stage. This has necessitated the use of clinically collected data to determine the sensitivity and specificity that can be achieved using a number of analysis techniques. A number of issues remain regarding the ability of the technique to locate lesions within a multi-dimensional plane, although these may be overcome by the efficient selection of appropriate imaging algorithms. Furthermore the capacity to determine electrical parameters from a given spectrum has been investigated. This has been shown to be possible although the use of a-priori information is indicated for non-homogeneous imaged pixels.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

PhD

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

De Montfort University

Year dc:date.issued

2001

Author dc:creator

• Tunstall, Benjamin Gavin

Licence

• https://dora.dmu.ac.uk/bitstreams/70d8226b-fad6-49d6-8134-44a3d464c9ae/download