Experiment research of electrical impedance tomography for monitoring the intraperitoneal bleeding of rabbit in vivo

Many reasons, such as traffic accident, abdomen post-operation, etc., may cause intraperitoneal bleeding. As a noninvasive imaging modality, electrical impedance tomography (EIT) may be applied for monitoring the intraperitoneal bleeding process of patient. In order to research the relationship between the bleeding and the monitoring processes, an EIT monitoring platform and a rabbit intraperitoneal bleeding model were desinged. The monitoring platform consists of hardware, software and 16 silver-electrode. Each silver-electrode was made of silver wire with diameter 2mm and length 50mm. All the 16 electrodes were embedded under the rabbit’s skin with equal space around its abdomen. The bleeding model was produced by hit the liver area with a self-made blunt iron shot from a nail-shooting gun. The distance between the rabbit and gun was adjusted to 70mm so that the skin was not injured but the liver was broken by the hitting. 15 anesthetic rabbits with liver bleeding were monitored by the EIT experiment platform, the bleeding volume of the broken liver ranged from 35ml∼50ml (41.9±3.1ml). Before hitting, the images was almost uniform. After hitting, the image became darker and the darker area enlarged as the bleeding process went on. This implies that as an image monitoring method, EIT is sensitive for monitoring the intraperitoneal bleeding.