Copyright © 2013 Chunjae Park and Oh In Kwon. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Magnetic resonance electrical impedance tomography (MREIT) measures magnetic flux density signals through the use of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in order to visualize the internal conductivity and/or current density. Understanding the reconstruction procedure for the internal current density, we directly measure the second derivative of data from the measured -space data, from which we can avoid a tedious phase unwrapping to obtain the phase signal of . We determine optimal weighting factors to combine the derivatives of magnetic flux density data, , measured using the multi-echo train. The proposed method reconstructs the internal current density using the relationships between the induced internal current and the measured data. Results from a phantom experiment demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the scanning time and provides the internal current density, while suppressing the background field inhomogeneity. To implement the real experiment, we use a phantom with a saline solution including a balloon, which excludes other artifacts by any concentration gradient in the phantom.