Electrical Impedance Spectroscopic Studies on Broiler Chicken Tissue Suitable for the Development of Practical Phantoms in Multifrequency EIT

Phantoms are essential for assessing the system performance in Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT). Saline phantoms with insulator inhomogeneity fail to mimic the physiological structure of real body tissue in several aspects. Saline or any other salt solution is purely resistive and hence studying multifrequency EIT systems cannot be assessed with saline phantoms because the response of the purely resistive materials do not change over frequency. Animal tissues show a variable response over a wide band of signal frequency due to their complex physiological and physiochemical structures and hence they can be suitably used as bathing medium and inhomogeneity in the phantoms of multifrequency EIT systems. An efficient assessment of a multifrequency EIT system with a real tissue phantom needs a prior knowledge of the impedance profile of the bathing medium as well as the inhomogeneity. In this direction Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) studies on broiler chicken muscle tissue paste, muscle tissue blocks and fat tissue blocks are conducted over a wide range of signal frequency using impedance analyzers, and their impedance profiles are analyzed. Results show that the chicken muscle tissue paste is less resistive than the fat tissue and hence it can be used successfully as the bathing medium of the phantoms for impedance imaging in multifrequency EIT. Fat tissue is found more resistive than the muscle tissue which makes it more suitable for the inhomogeneity in phantoms of impedance imaging study. Moreover, as there is a large difference between the resistivities of muscle tissue and fat tissue they can be used as either inhomogeneity or background medium. EIS studies also show that the variations in the impedance parameters of a muscle tissue block are greater than in the tissue paste as the cell membrane structures are destroyed in tissue paste. Results also show that the α and β dispersions are visible in all the parameters of both the tissue samples, but both the dispersions are larger in the muscle tissue block. The Nyquist plot obtained for the muscle tissue block demonstrates that the equivalent electric model of the tissue sample contains Warburg impedance and a constant phase element.