A Pilot Study of Electrical Impedance Tomography for Dynamic Monitoring of Human Cerebral Perfusion

Real-time monitoring of cerebral blood perfusion has very important clinical application value in the diagnosis and treatment of cerebral diseases, and has become an urgent need to further improve the clinical treatment level of related diseases. In order to explore the feasibility of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) for dynamic monitoring of human cerebral blood perfusion, this study simulated carotid artery occlusion with reference to the way of carotid artery compression. The perfusion monitoring EIT equipment EC100 was used to measure the impedance of 12 healthy volunteers wearing scalp-mounted electrodes, and the changes of impedance blood flow signals during the stage of carotid artery compression were observed. A perfusion index was extracted from the impedance blood flow signals of volunteers by offline analysis, and the significant differences between the perfusion index in different states were analyzed. Reconstructed EIT images can directly reflect the significant reduction of cerebral blood perfusion on the compressed side, and the extracted image index can also reflect the difference of left and right cerebral blood perfusion at different stages. The preliminary results show that EIT is feasible to detect variations in human cerebral perfusion status, and has wide application potential in brain function research and the detection of brain disease progression.