Fisher information analysis in electrical impedance tomography

This paper provides a quantitative analysis of the optimal accuracy and resolution in electrical impedance tomography (EIT) based on the Cramér-Rao lower bound. The imaging problem is characterized by the forward operator and its Jacobian. The Fisher information operator is defined for a deterministic parameter in a real Hilbert space and a stochastic measurement in a finite-dimensional complex Hilbert space with a Gaussian measure. The connection between the Fisher information and the singular value decomposition (SVD) based on the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion (the ML-based SVD) is established. It is shown that the eigenspaces of the Fisher information provide a suitable basis to quantify the trade-off between the accuracy and the resolution of the (nonlinear) inverse problem. It is also shown that the truncated ML-based pseudo-inverse is a suitable regularization strategy for a linearized problem, which exploits sufficient statistics for estimation within these subspaces. The statistical-based Cramér-Rao lower bound provides a complement to the deterministic upper bounds and the L-curve techniques that are employed with linearized inversion. To this end, electrical impedance tomography provides an interesting example where the eigenvalues of the SVD usually do not exhibit a very sharp cut-off, and a trade-off between the accuracy and the resolution may be of practical importance. A numerical study of a hypothetical EIT problem is described, including a statistical analysis of the model errors due to the linearization. © 2013 Sinopec Geophysical Research Institute.