Abstract
Clinical studies had demonstrated that early diagnosis of lesion could significantly reduce the risk of cancer. Magneto-acoustic-electrical tomography (MAET) is expected to become a new detection method due to its advantages of high resolution and high contrast. Based on thinking of modular design, a low-cost, digital magneto-acoustic conductivity detection system was designed and implemented in this study. The theory of MAET using chirp continuous wave excitation was introduced. The results of homogeneous phantom experiment with 0.5% NaCl clearly showed that the conductivity curve of homogeneous phantom was highly consistent with the actual physical size, which indicated that the chirp excitation theory in our proposed system was correct and feasible. Besides, the resolution obtained by 1 000 μs sweep time was better than that obtained by 500 μs and 1 500 μs, which means that sweep time is an important factor affecting the detection resolution of the conductivity. The same result was obtained in the experiments carried out on homogeneous phantoms with different concentrations of NaCl, which demonstrated the repeatability of our proposed MAET system.