ABSTRACT
A noncontact, noninvasive, electrical permittivity imaging technique is proposed for monitoring loosening of osseointegrated prostheses and bone fracture. The proposed method utilizes electrical capacitance tomography (ECT), which employs a set of noncontact electrodes, arranged in a circular fashion around the imaging area, for electrical excitations and measurements. An inverse reconstruction algorithm was developed and implemented to reconstruct the electrical permittivity distribution of the interrogated region from boundary capacitance measurements. In this study, osseointegrated prosthesis phantoms were prepared using plastic rods and Sawbone femur specimens, which were subjected to prosthesis loosening and fracture monitoring tests. The results demonstrated that the spatial location and extent of prosthesis loosening and bone fracture could be estimated from the ECT reconstructed permittivity maps. The resolution of the reconstructed images was further enhanced by a limited region tomography algorithm, and its accuracy in terms of identifying the severity, location, and shape of bone fracture was also investigated and compared with conventional full region tomography.