Performance comparison for on-chip 3D ECT using peripheral and distributed electrode arrangement

Abstract

Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a non-invasive imaging technique and has potential usage in lab-on-chip (LOC) imaging. The current design of on-chip ECT is reported to utilise the peripheral electrode arrangement where the planar electrodes are arranged at the side of sensing chamber. The on-chip ECT using peripheral electrode arrangement is capable of 2D imaging but little is known on the practical application of the sensor design in 3D imaging as compared to the distributed electrode arrangement sensor. In this paper, the 3D imaging performance of peripheral and distributed electrode arrangement sensors was compared through a simulation study. A cube phantom was used as a test sample for 3D imaging and it was placed at several test positions in the sensing chamber. The 3D image was reconstructed by using the linear back projection (LBP) algorithm. The reconstructed 3D image was quantitatively analysed using the correlation coefficient and the spatial image error. Both electrode arrangement is able to reconstruct 3D images and distributed electrode arrangement sensor performed better than the peripheral.