Electrical properties tomography (ETP) enables find the electrical properties of tissues in a non-invasive method by using the magnetic fields of an MRI scanner. EPT can be used in clinic to assess...Show moreElectrical properties tomography (ETP) enables find the electrical properties of tissues in a non-invasive method by using the magnetic fields of an MRI scanner. EPT can be used in clinic to assess lesions in the breast. Still, there is a lot of variance between inter-subject conductivity values. In this project, we studied the effect of SNR, which we varied by receiving the signal with different coils. The effect of the pulse sequence was investigated by scanning a phantom and a healthy volunteer with a 3D turbo spin echo (TSE), a 3D balanced steady state free precession (bSSFP) and additionally the healthy volunteer was scanned with a 2D TSE. Lastly, we studied the effect of noise-smoothing operations by pre-processing the data with a Gaussian filter with a standard deviation of 2 pixels and post-processing with a 5x5 pixel median filter. We found that the noise does not affect the mean value of the conductivity. Also, the noise can be smoothed with the operations described above. Artifacts caused by acquisition does influence the values that we obtained. From the sequences that were used, we found that the 2D TSE resulted in the best conductivity map. In the future, we hope to differentiate benign from malignant tumors in breast data by applying this sequence in the clinic, such that histology of the tumoral tissue can be abolished.Show less
