A Modular Magnetic Induction Tomography System for Low-Conductivity Medium Imaging

Due to the noncontact, nonradiative, and low-cost features, magnetic induction tomography (MIT) is highly applicable in conductive medium imaging. To meet the demands of low-conductivity medium imaging in industrial and biomedical applications, a portable, flexible, and extensible MIT system with high-phase detection precision is proposed. The proposed system is designed with different modules. Therefore, it is flexible to extend and meet different applications. The sensor modules can be used as both the excitation and the detection. The detected signal is directly demodulated at the sensor end, which avoids the external interference that may be introduced into the transmission of the detected signal. A phase demodulation part is designed which can achieve 0.0068° phase detection precision. Furthermore, the designed system does not need to rely on other instruments to realize the signal generation and demodulation, which makes the MIT system independent and portable in the practical application. The sensing coils have high consistency, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the demodulated signal is over 60 dB. To illustrate the performance of the system, the capability of reconstructing low-conductivity saline solutions is studied. The images of conductivity distribution are obtained using the Tikhonov regularization method. The minimum detectable volume of saline solution is 10 mL, with a spatial resolution of 16.6%. The minimum detectable conductivity is 0.1 S/m, and the maximum detectable depth is 40 mm. The reconstructed results indicate the feasibility of low-conductivity medium imaging in the industrial and biomedical applications by the proposed MIT system.