An Innovative Two-Step Method for MR-Based Electrical Properties Tomography

Magnetic resonance electrical properties tomography is a noninvasive imaging technique aimed at estimating the electromagnetic properties of biological tissues from magnetic resonance data. The underlying task involves a nonlinear and ill-posed inverse problem. In this work, a twostep method is proposed to reformulate the problem as a cascade of linear subproblems. In the first step, a linear ill-posed inverse problem is solved to estimate the distribution of contrast sources and the internal electric field within the region of interest. In the second step, the electrical properties are retrieved through a least-squares fitting based on the quantities estimated in the first step. A numerical example involving a simple phantom is presented to provide an initial validation of the proposed approach.