Characteristics and topic trends on electrical impedance tomography hardware publications

Objective: Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a technique to measure electrical properties of tissue. With the progress of modern integrated circuits and microchips, EIT instrumentation becomes an active research area to improve all aspects of device performance. Plenty of studies on EIT hardware have been presented in prestigious journals. This study explores publications on EIT hardware to identify the developing hotspots and trends. Method: Publications covering EIT hardware on the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database from 1989 to 2021 were collected for bibliometric analysis. CiteSpace and VOS viewer were used to study the characteristics of the publications. Main results: A total of 592 publications were analyzed, showing that the number of annual publications steadily increased. China, England, and South Korea were the most prolific countries on EIT hardware publications with productive native institutions and authors. Research topics spread out in “bio-electrical impedance imaging”, “hardware optimization”, “algorithms” and “clinical applications” (e.g., tissue, lung, brain, and oncology). Hardware research in “pulmonary” and “hemodynamic” applications focused on monitoring and were represented by silhouette recognition and dynamic imaging while research in “tumor and tissue” and “brain” applications focused on diagnosis and were represented by optimization of precision. Electrode development was a research focus through the years. Imaging precision and bioavailability of hardware optimization may be the future trend. Conclusion: Overall, system performance, particularly in the areas of system bandwidth and precision in applications may be the future directions of hardware research.