The results in Figure 1 demonstrate that EIT can produce an excellent image of the area affected by electroporation. It should be noted that these results are theoretical and much work remains before this method becomes a clinical technique. These results must be reproduced and verified using an actual EIT system to image physical phantoms, ex vivo tissue samples, and eventually in vivo tissues, Complexities that have been ignored in this preliminary study may need to be addressed at that stage. These include inhomogeneities in real world liver samples from larger blood vessels, non-planar currents in 3D regions, and nonlinear electrode behavior. In electroporation, as in all the other molecular medicine techniques, there is no method to determine during the procedure that the cell membranes have become temporarily permeabilized in the desired area. This study demonstrates that real-time monitoring of molecular medicine in vivo can be achieved through the synthesis of two fairly well understood techniques, electroporation and EIT.
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